Jun 22, 2011 12:44 GMT  ·  By

FBI agents have raided a Maryland datacenter, possibly in connection with an investigation into LulzSec, and seized three racks of blade servers that contained innocent websites.

According to the New York Times, the raid began at 1:15 am and the seized servers belonged to a Switzerland-based co-location company called DigitalOne.

The company had previously been in contact with the law enforcement agency and gave it all the information necessary to identify one particular server corresponding to an IP address.

The seizure of multiple boxes came as a total surprise to DigitalOne CEO Sergej Ostroumow. "The agents took entire server racks, perhaps because they mistakenly thought that one enclosure is = to one server," he said.

The raid affected tens of DigitalOne's clients in one way or another. Curbed Network, a New York-based publisher of dining, nightlife, shopping, fashion, design and real estate blogs was left with its websites offline.

Online bookmarking site Pinboard had to resort to using a backup server with limited capabilities, while Instapaper, a service for saving news articles for a later read, experienced slowdowns.

"This problem is caused by the F.B.I., not our company. In the night F.B.I. has taken 3 enclosures with equipment plugged into them, possibly including your server — we cannot check it," Ostroumow wrote to one of the affected clients.

DigitalOne initially believed the problems were caused by a technical glitch, but it was informed of the raid by someone at the datacenter three hours after it began. Being in Switzerland and with no employee on site due to the late hour, there wasn't much the company could do.

Since the incident, its team has been working relentlessly to restore service for some of the badly affected customers, as well as its own website, which is still offline at the time of writing this article.

Despite official confirmation, there's a strong possibility the raid was connected to an ongoing investigation into LulzSec, the hacking group that attacked many companies, organizations and even government agencies in recent weeks.