3-18-2024 About Sunday's Downtime
As you likely know, Hattrick went offline Sunday afternoon around 15.30 CET and stayed down all evening. The reason was a failed disk in our database server, which was not critical in itself but led to follow-on software effects, which led to a spontaneous reboot of the operating system. When the system came back online, we had to perform various maintenance and repair tasks to ensure that all data was intact and secure before bringing the site back up.
When the site came back online, we extended all the transfers whose deadlines fell during the downtime and immediately afterwards by 24 hours, and then restarted the game engine. This made it possible for the game engine to catch up overnight, making sure most matches and scheduled updates occurred on schedule by Monday morning.
In the end, no game data or otherwise important data was lost. What was lost was time, and the chance for many users to submit or update their match orders during Sunday afternoon and evening. We considered delaying restarting the game to give users a second window to submit lineups, but as often is the case in situations like this, that solution risked new problems, and we decided it was safer and better not to do this.
Please let this serve as a reminder of the importance of submitting match orders early, and having a standard lineup as a backup. You can always revise an in-place lineup close to kick-off if need be, but not having any decent lineup in place is always risky.
Today, we applied also a small fix so that users aiming to achieve the goal of watching all league matches live this season will not be penalized for this downtime. Matches will be counted as having been seen.