Service outage
Complete outage of the elpitazo.net website and deletion of the news archive from the Contabo hosting provider’s server (November 2025)
The Venezuelan digital media outlet El Pitazo reported that its website, elpitazo.net, had been completely down since Thursday, November 20–21, 2025, and the deletion of its entire journalistic archive—nearly 11 years’ worth of content—stored on the server that hosted it, owned by the German hosting company Contabo, based in Munich. According to a statement from El Pitazo’s board of directors, Contabo notified them that “all the information stored there has been deleted and that they do not know how it happened.” The news outlet tried unsuccessfully to obtain an explanation from the provider: on Saturday, November 22, it sent a letter to Contabo’s executive board, including CEO Stephan Wolfram and Vice President of Finance Mario Wilhelm, requesting an immediate solution, and as of Monday, November 24, it had not received a response. El Pitazo and the National Union of Press Workers (SNTP) did not rule out the possibility that this was an incident linked to an unacknowledged or unreported attack, given the history of blockades and attacks against the media outlet (Conatel had previously ordered the blocking of four of its domains: elpitazo.com, elpitazo.info, elpitazo.ml, and elpitazo.net) and the repeated pressure from reputation management firms to remove or modify content about politically exposed individuals. The exact cause of the deletion (an attack, an error, or a deliberate action by the provider) was not publicly confirmed. The outlet’s team worked urgently to set up a new website and blog on another server, while keeping its social media channels and YouTube channel active.
El Pitazo