As the publisher of the Virgin Islands Free Press, I’ve spent 37 years translating the staccato of the night—the sirens in Frederiksted and the 200 rounds fired at a Peter’s Rest crime scene—into actionable information. But this Easter Monday, as the VIPD issued urgent warnings about a tactical “Cycle of the Steal” carjacking wave, my newsroom was silenced by a “Digital Blockade” from GoDaddy.
This wasn’t a one-off technical glitch. It was the third act in a month-long fiasco of corporate malpractice.
The First Fiasco: In mid-March, as the industry shifted to a 200-day SSL cycle, GoDaddy’s automated systems left our “Secure Connection” in a tailspin. We were met with 504 Gateway Timeouts that turned our investigations into digital ghosts.
The Second Fiasco: When the “Not Secure” warnings returned, we were told our site needed a “cleanup” for a configuration error their own servers created. It was a classic shakedown: pay for a cure to a disease the doctor invented.
The Third Fiasco: This morning, Nikola V—an “A1” technician for a holiday Monday—spent an hour analyzing PHP logs from three days ago while a 403 Forbidden error gagged our reporting of a mass shooting. Instead of clearing a simple firewall cache, he attempted to upsell me a $120-a-month “Website Care” package.
It is a chilling reality: while U.S. citizens in St. Croix are told by police to “walk in packs” to avoid being carjacked, the tech giants they rely on for safety are busy checking their quarterly sales quotas. Even Elon Musk—who would surely recognize the irony of a “Forbidden” sign on a news site—understands that when the telemetry hits zero, the mission has failed.
This “Cycle of the Fail” in Big Tech is as dangerous as the “Cycle of the Steal” on our streets. St. Croix deserves a voice that isn’t for sale for $120 a month.
–John McCarthy