Either their physical security sucks, or someone planned a hardcore black op.
CI Host, a professional colocation facility based out of Chicago, Illinois, is ostensibly paid by many small businesses to host servers for them, or provide managed hosting space for websites, e-commerce sites, and what have you. What they don't tell you on the Flash-enhanced frontpage of their website is that they've been broken into four times in two years, and I don't mean that someone cracked their network, I mean that a team of burglars broke into the facility, took out members of the on-site staff, and stole thousands of dollars of equipment. A team of physical intruders cut its way into the building at least once with a power saw, tortured the night manager with a stungun (please keep in mind that stunguns and tazer guns are very different weapons; the former is a close-range contact weapon while the latter is technically a projectile weapon), and then walked off with twenty servers. As if that weren't enough, CI Host hid the fact that they'd been burglarized from its customers.
I don't know if they're lying through their teeth about their physical security, if their security sucks a lot more than they think, or if criminals these days really are that well equipped and putting that much time and effort into planning heists. Regardless, it's definitely time to think about the places you're paying to host your data because the stakes are now much higher than previously believed.
I can't shake the feeling that this feels like something out of the plot of a children's cartoon show from the 1980's.
Oh, by the way, someone leaked the police reports from the first three break-ins. Check it:
