Official News - page 1

PROBLEMS ON THURSDAY NIGHT

by Hazed

Thursday was a very eventful day! Bella's new code caused some unexpected problems after the reset - see the next story for the details - but the most serious problems were in the evening when a power outage took down the Fed2 Server.

What happened was this. A really severe storm (one of those that only happens every hundred years or so) caused a lightning strike to a power pole, which knocked out the utility power to the whole area (Parsippany, New Jersey) where the data center is located. The building's UPS kicked in so all the servers continued to run on the battery power. However, the generator which was supposed to start up automatically, did not - so when the UPS batteries ran out of juice, the whole site lost power. It turned out that the generator itself had also been hit by lightning which is what stopped it from switching on. The engineers got the generator running by doing a manual start and that restored power to the facilities, so Fed came back up after a short while.

So the first problem is that some players will have lost whatever they had done because of the crash.

But there's a more serious problem, which is that when the server went down unexpectedly, it brought the billing code (which handles the logon process) to a shuddering halt, and some accounts got corrupted. When the affected players try to log on, they get told their ID or password is wrong.

There was a second crash a bit later, when we tried to repair one of the damaged accounts but it didn't work, but in that crash Fed2 shut down a little more gracefully and saved everything properly, so nobody lost anything.

So the second problem is the corrupted accounts.

Fixing the first problem is easy. If you lost anything that you did between the reset and the crash on Thursday, please email the details to feedback@ibgames.com so we can compensate you for your losses. Don't forget to tell us your Fed2 character name.

Fixing the second problem is a lot trickier. The problem is that the corrupted accounts can't be fixed, so the affected players have to start over again and then get bumped up the ranks to their old position - a tedious process that takes a couple of days, even with the intervention of the demi-goddess.

And I should know, because it happened to me! Yes, my account was one of those corrupted, so for a very short time the citizens of Fed DataSpace were amused to see GroundHog Hazed running around; and once I became an Industrialist again they all rushed to own a piece of me in the form of shares. It was a humiliating experience!

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