Mobile operating system GrapheneOS has revealed that it is exiting OVHcloud, citing concerns with France's digital privacy policies.

As reported by The Register, the company revealed the decision in a lengthy post to X.

"We no longer have any active servers in France and are continuing the process of leaving OVH," wrote GrapheneOS.

The post goes on to add: "France isn't a safe country for open source privacy projects. They expect backdoors in encryption and for device access too. Secure devices and services are not going to be allowed. We don't feel safe using OVH for even a static website with servers in Canada/US via their Canada/US subsidiaries."

Currently, GrapheneOS is hosted on sponsored servers from ReliableSite in Los Angeles and Miami in the US; Tempest in London, which is a "temporary location due to an emergency move from a provider," hosting its NS1 anycast network on Vultr and BuyBM, and still has five servers in Canada with OBH, with more than static content that will be moved to Netcup root servers in the short term, then colocated servers in Toronto in the long term.

As per The Register report, OVH's CEO, Octave Klaba, responded to GrapheneOS with his own post to X, calling GrapheneOS' post "confusing." Klaba added: "Reading your tweet, you can imagine something bad happened to your servers in OVHcloud. It's not the case. Nothing happened. Please fix the communication and ... keep doing what you do!"

While Klaba may have been keen to reiterate that OVH servers hadn't suffered any issues, GrapheneOS' concerns center around France's legislative position on the proposed EU Chat Control legislation that requires providers (including OVH as a French company) to give authorities access to user content.

The company is currently also involved in legal action in Canada, reports The Register, with the Canadian court ordering OVH to hand over some customer data that is hosted in Europe as part of a criminal investigation. While OVH has a North America-based subsidiary, the servers in question are under OVH Group - a French company - which has laws prohibiting such action to authorities outside of "official treaties."

DCD has contacted OVH for comment on both situations.

In late November, OVH suffered an outage at its cloud region in Gravelines, France. No explanation for the outage has been provided at the time of writing.