OceanGate Is Trying to Delete Its Existence From the Internet

OceanGate is working hard to disappear itself. Less than three weeks after a crew of explorers was confirmed to have died on the Titan submersible, the company has begun scrubbing every aspect of its existence from the internet. OceanGate’s social media pages were found to have gone dark Friday morning, joining the OceanGate website in the digital graveyard.

Following the news of the Titan sub’s implosion, OceanGate added a small notice to its website saying it had “suspended all exploration and commercial operations.” The notice simply hovered at the top of the screen, leaving the site still navigable. But the company appears to have switched up its strategy since then. While OceanGate’s home page still appears at the top of search engine results, clicking the link (or typing in the URL yourself) takes you to a black screen reiterating that operations have been suspended. 

OceanGate’s social media pages, however, are nowhere to be found. Searching the company’s Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram usernames earns you a variable “This page does not exist” response, as does manually entering their URLs. 

OceanGate’s Twitter page as of Friday morning.
Credit: ExtremeTech

OceanGate is trying to avoid negative press by removing access to its profiles and contact points. At best, the deep sea exploration startup will never do business again; at worst, regulators and the wealthy families of those who died aboard Titan will go after what remains of OceanGate for negligence. Since the submersible disappeared in mid-June, it’s become clear the company operated with a disregard for personal or material safety. CEO Stockton Rush (who was among those who died on the expedition) boasted about his lack of safety precautions, saying: “At some point safety just is pure waste.”

Nonetheless, removing oneself from the internet is almost always impossible—especially if you’re one of the most talked-about businesses of 2023. OceanGate can delete its profiles, but it can’t delete the countless articles and video uploads others have used to document the company’s battery issues, usage of expired materials, and flippant refusal to follow safety regulations, among other things. Rush wanted to be remembered for the rules he broke, and now he will be, regardless of whether his company’s Twitter account lives on.