MorrowLock said 684,200 account archives were exported between Monday morning and Wednesday morning, after 312 engineers and support workers began striking over a proposed recovery feature. The Irish Data Portability Register, which tracks transfers among participating providers, called it the largest two-day movement of encrypted accounts it has recorded since tracking began in 2022.
The Dublin company said 218,000 of those archives had been imported by customers into other services by Wednesday night. The transfers involved about 4.7 petabytes of data, according to the register, and no customer files became publicly readable during the process.
The dispute over recovery keys
The strike began at 10:00 on 26 October, after staff objected to a planned option that would let a designated third party restore access to a locked account. MorrowLock had been weighing the feature for public-sector customers. Workers said it could weaken the firm’s existing system, which is designed so the company cannot read stored files.
“We were not asking people to stay. We wanted them to have a real choice if they decided to leave,” said Rebecca Kerschbaumer, a software tester and member of the strike committee. She said staff had pressed management for a simple export format for more than a year.
A customer should be able to leave without asking the company they are leaving for permission.
Rebecca Kerschbaumer, software tester
Workers returned at 18:00 on 27 October after management agreed to drop the recovery feature from the core service and release an open transfer tool. The settlement also includes a joint technical committee, a review of on-call workloads and €1.6 million (about $1.9 million) in back pay and allowances, according to a summary provided to staff.
Customers test the exit route
MorrowLock product director Christian Stadler-Weiß said the company had prepared an export package before the strike but had not expected customers to use it at this scale. “We underestimated how quickly people would act when the argument became public,” he said. The firm says its service remained available throughout the walkout.
The register counted completed archive exports, not repeated downloads or routine syncing. Fourteen providers supplied figures for the comparison, said Francesca Pellegrini, its technical director. She described the surge as a first for the Irish market and said the public totals could be checked against anonymised transfer receipts.
For customers, the process was less seamless than the headline figure suggests. Some had to re-enter account settings or wait for large files to transfer overnight. The register said its help desk received 9,400 requests on Tuesday, mostly about lost folder labels and duplicate files rather than failed transfers.
The strike has not ended arguments over how software firms should handle recovery requests from public bodies. MorrowLock says it will consider account-recovery features only after a new review by its technical committee; Kerschbaumer said workers would judge the agreement by whether the company keeps the export tool working.
The company expects to publish the tool’s technical instructions in November and says other providers can adopt the same format without a fee. The register plans to release a fuller account of the transfers next month, including how many customers completed a move rather than simply downloading an archive.
