Kim Dotcom was acting up again yesterday, screaming blue murder over the fact that LeaseWeb, one of Megaupload’s former hosting providers, had apparently deleted “petabytes of data” belonging to users of the now defunct storage service. According to Dotcom, LeaseWeb’s decision amounted to the “largest data massacre in the history of the internet,” and was made even worse because the Dutch hosting company apparently gave him no warning of what it was about to do.

It’s understandable that Dotcom would be frustrated, as not only does it mean thousands of Megaupload users have lost all hope of reclaiming their data, but it also means that potential evidence that could help him in his upcoming legal case has been lost forever. On the bright side, LeaseWeb wasn’t the only company to work with Megaupload, and data held by Carpathia and Cogent is apparently still secure.

But is Dotcom really as outraged as he makes out? According to LeaseWeb, he can’t be, as it claims that Dotcom in fact never made any attempt whatsoever to reclaim his user’s data. In an angry rebuttal posted onto its company blog this morning, LeaseWeb points out that it kept the Megaupload data secure for a year at its own expense, and that it only decided to repurpose its servers after no one expressed any interest in the data.

“When Megaupload was taken offline, 60 servers owned by MegaUpload were directly confiscated by the FIOD and transported to the US. Next to that, MegaUpload still had 630 rented dedicated servers with LeaseWeb.”

“During the year we stored the servers and the data, we received no request for access nor any request to retain the data. After a year of nobody showing any interest in the servers and data we considered our options. We did inform MegaUpload about our decision to re-provision the servers,”

Dotcom tells a different story however, claiming that LeaseWeb only told Megaupload about the data now, more than four months after deleting the data on February 1 this year.

This prompted an angry spate of tweets from Dotcom yesterday, in which he claimed he had in fact been in regular contact with the hosting provider as he sought to retrieve Megaupload’s data:

“Our legal team and @EFF have written several data preservation demands to #Leaseweb. We were never warned about the deletion.”

“Let me be crystal clear. #Leaseweb has NEVER informed our legal team or anybody at #Megaupload about the deletion of servers until TODAY.”

Clearly someone isn’t telling the whole truth, but it’s difficult to say who. On the one hand, it’s hard to believe that Dotcom would have made a big issue out of this had he already known the data was going to be deleted – and moreover, why would he only make a fuss about it now if he had any knowledge of what was going down? But the again, why would LeaseWeb, a company whose entire business depends on its customer’s trust, do something to jeopardize that – in particular to someone as vocal as Kim Dotcom?

Neither course of action seems to make much sense – the only explanation is that someone’s trying to cover their tracks.