After a long day of detective work and working through some issues, the www.collective2.com site is back up and should be functioning normally.
Thanks for your extreme patience, and going forward we will work hard to ensure that a partial outage like this does not again occur.
Matt Vella
Lead Software Engineer
Collective2
Do you know if any financial data was compromised, as far as credit card numbers go?
Good question. Account passwords are sent out in plain text so maybe this is something that can be changed.
I’m a bit embarrassed (but also relieved) to tell you that the reason for yesterday’s site problems (they affected mostly the old site, but also, it turned out, the new one) was not any sort of malicious “cyber attack,” but rather my own incompetence.
I had monkeyed around with one of our database tables manually, which in turn led to the site’s software flailing, looking for a record that needed to exist, but that didn’t.
This in turn caused our software to begin writing millions of records in our database, which made it seem like we were under some sort of attack from a clever foe.
But we have seen the enemy, and it is ourselves. More specifically - it was me. Too many days of not sleeping enough were ultimately the cause. I am really sorry for the false alarm, and also, of course, for yesterday’s site slowdowns. Things should be better today.
Lol.
