Beyond just providing easy TV access to college students without cable, Megaupload and the other sites in its network helped encompass the largest digital locker service in the world. While we suspect that the majority of Megaupload users were not storing family photos and personal documents, the site was exceedingly popular with users.
Ars Technica reports that Megaupload consumed more bandwidth in corporate workplaces than cloud-storage and collaboration services like Dropbox and Box.net.
Since the Megaupload shutdown, users with non-infringing content served on Megaupload’s servers have expressed outrage at no longer having access to their content.
According to the federal indictment, the data center that housed Megaupload’s servers had more than 1,000 different computers and contained more than 25 petabytes (25 million gigabytes) of data storage. That’s a lot of data.