Difference between revisions of "Great April Derp"

So, we finally have our Forums and SpacePort back up. However, these good tidings come with some unfortunate ones. Here's what happened:

Last week, the server that hosts SpacePort and the KSP Forums started getting slower and slower until the sites were pretty much unusable. We eventually had to shut it down, but by that time the damage was done. The slowness was coming from an excessively high number of idle connections, which may or may not have been related to a global denial-of-service attack that affected thousands of sites last week. Whether or not that was actually the case for us is hard to tell, but in any case, the end result was that we ended up with a server so broken, it needed to be wiped out completely and reinstalled from scratch.

We keep regular backups of all our databases, exactly for situations such as this. Spaceport was restored just fine. However, due to a fault in our backup process that went largely unnoticed until now, the most recent snapshots we had for the Forums were partially corrupted or incomplete.

We've been able to get the Forums back up, but on some areas of the database, we were forced to revert to older backups, in some cases reaching as far back as October. This means that unfortunately there's been some data loss, mainly affecting threads and most grievously, user accounts.

If your account dates from before October last year, you should be fine. However, if you created your account recently, there's a good chance it will be missing, in which case you'll have to re-create it.

Rest assured though, this does not in any way affect your Store account. Those live on a separate database on a separate server, and they're perfectly fine, so your store profile is safe. This issue only affects forum accounts.

Regardless, we are aware this is big a setback for a lot of people, and we sincerely apologize for it. Despite all our efforts, there was nothing we could do to get all the data back. We're still working hard on getting everything we can salvage from the partial backups we have though, so we can bring back as much content as possible.

Needless to say, we're setting up a new, much more robust backup system, to make sure this never happens again. We are also adding in new security systems to minimize damage from attacks like that as much as possible.

Once again, we deeply apologize for the inconvenience.

Sincerely,