OceanGate is scrubbing the internet clean of its digital footprint, shutting down its website and purging its accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social networks.
As of Friday morning, OceanGate’s website had gone dark. “OceanGate Expeditions has suspended all exploration and commercial operations,” its landing page reads.
It’s unclear when the website’s content about its eight-day submersible trips down to the Titanic shipwreck was replaced with a black screen and the short message.
The company’s social media sites also weren’t available to the public on Friday.
The Post was unable to locate OceanGate’s Facebook page, and its Instagram page was turned private, though it still follows over 400 accounts.
OceanGate Expeditions’ Instagram account, though, appears to have been taken down.
LinkedIn said: “The page you’re searching for no longer exists,” and Twitter showed a notice that the @OceanGate “account doesn’t exist.”
OceanGate added a notice to the top its webpage last week that it has ceased operations earlier this month.
At the time, visitors were still able to navigate through the site’s other pages, which included information about the “Titanic Expedition” that was listed “from $250,000.”
The Post has reached out to OceanGate for comment.
The deep-sea exploration company was co-founded in 2009 by Guillermo Söhnlein and Stockton Rush.
Söhnlein, an Argentine-American businessman, left OceanGate in 2013 and turned his portfolio over to Rush, who continued working for the brand as its CEO.
Rush, 61, was controlling the sub when it suffered a “catastrophic implosion,” killing Rush and the four other passengers on board: British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, his son, Sulaiman Dawood, 19, and French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77.
Though OceanGate billed itself on the internet as a company for daredevils to “follow in Jacques Cousteau’s footsteps and become an underwater explorer.”
However, a would-be passenger on the ill-fated Titan submersible trip down to the famed shipwreck revealed that Rush wasn’t interested in tourism at all — he merely needed to fund his obsession with the Titanic.
Las Vegas financier Jay Bloom, who pulled out of the doomed voyage over safety concerns, told The Post: “[Rush] wasn’t really looking to build a tourism business to the Titanic. He wanted to research and document the decay of the ship over time.”
“Multiple dives to the site costs a lot of money. A way to finance his scientific observation was to bring observers down with him,” Bloom added.
Rush charged $250,000 for a ticket aboard the sub, earning him $1 million per trip.
Though it was unclear how much money it took to operate Titan, Rush appeared strapped for cash, even using off-the-shelf parts to construct the sub — a move that has been criticized as reason for the vessel’s tragic end.
A team of engineers released a video animation of the implosion earlier this month, showing how Titan’s carbon-fiber make-up wasn’t strong enough to withstand the pressure at the Titanic’s 12,500-foot depth at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
“There is around 5,600 pounds per square inch of pressure. That’s almost 400 times the pressure we experience on the surface,” the video says.
Such force caused the OceanGate sub to crumple “within a fraction of a millisecond,” the narrator added as an animation showed a three-dimensional OceanGate-branded submersible being crushed and torn apart.
Titan is believed to have imploded on June 18 — less than two hours into its dive the wreck at a depth of about 5,500 feet in the North Atlantic, killing all five passengers on board.
[Written in collaboration with other media outlets with information from the following sources]
