08/04/2026
Metamute Web Server: Cyber Threat Response
Mute’s website and web server came under a cyber threat in December 2025 and our website had to be taken offline. Although a version of the website is now back online, the incident requires a complete rebuild of our digital infrastructure.
Metamute server independence & vulnerability
Mute magazine has run its own web-publishing infrastructure for over thirty years. Since moving off the Bartlett School of Architecture server space kindly offered to our pilot in 1994, the magazine’s online content has been self-hosted, open access, and open-source. Metamute holds more than 10,000 articles covering culture, politics, and technology continuously from the early 1990s well into the 2020s.
But as all indy projects know, such digital sovereignty carries a hefty technical price tag and a guaranteed flow of cyber threats. Indeed, in December 2025, Mute was contacted by a ‘bug bounty service’ who gave notice of security vulnerabilities in the site, offering to fix these. When we made our own investigations, it became clear that some historical issues with the Metamute site had become critical, meaning a hack and takedown was possible if not imminent. The problems were deep-rooted enough to threaten other infrastructures on the server that hosted it, too. We decided to take it offline and start the first longer-term outage in more than thirty years.
We have put in place measures to prevent hacks; no content, software, or personal data have been compromised, and the server is backed up in multiple remote locations. We have also put up a temporary flat file website while we work out longer-term repair of the server.
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