You might’ve noticed we had a serious outage that took down our website, forums—everything.
Some people have speculated on what could be so catastrophic as to take us down for WEEKS?
For legal reasons, I can't get into the details other than to say it wasn't ransomware but it was a total data loss. This catastrophe wiped out everything at our data center, including the on-site backups, so we lost over three decades of data in one hit.
Fortunately, we run nightly offsite backups, but they’re enormous—about 34 terabytes. That’s 34,000 gigabytes, all of which has to be downloaded, scanned, extracted, and then reuploaded to new servers. Just the download alone took over a week. Then came the challenge of figuring out which parts needed immediate restoring, in which order, and whether we should rebuild them piece by piece, create entirely new services, or move to a cloud-based infrastructure to avoid having a single colocation ever again.
We’re talking about a giant library of websites, databases, skins, themes, icons, wallpapers, videos, and more. Some of it’s ancient, from when we started well before Google or Facebook existed. Imagine sifting through tens of thousands of gigabytes to find a single legacy web service, built decades ago, that needs to run on a specific OS. It’s a painstaking process.
This outage has been extremely difficult. Everything from old box art for our products to OS/2 programs I wrote in my college days—gone, at least until offsite backups did their job. We had fallback backups on hard drives, DVDs, tapes, and so on, but for a while, it wasn’t entirely clear how much of that would be usable.
A fun fact some may not know: we have one of the oldest continuously used forums around, migrated from Usenet eons ago. That entire environment was wiped, so we’re rebuilding it from offsite storage. Not everything is back yet, and it looks like a few forum user accounts will be lost. That’s not related to customer data, but still worth noting.
We appreciate everyone’s patience. Getting services running again has been the top priority. It’s been a monumental effort, but we’re seeing real progress each day, and the community’s understanding means a lot.
Thanks for sticking with us,
-Brad (Founder & CEO)
If anyone wants to do the math on how long it takes to download 34,000 gigabytes at various speeds here's a table. Mind you, this is just downloading. It doesn't include scanning the data, extracting the data, and re-uploading the data.
Now, our direct connection does get around 4Gb/s but that's you get into some real bottlenecks.
It has been pretty illuminating how slow a lot of things actually are that you would think would be much much faster. Especially things that have to scan the integrity of a file or how slow extracting millions (literally) of little files.
It sure is great to have these forums (and other services) back up, and in some cases (looking at you AlienGPT) improved too! Kudos to the engineering team that manage to get it all working.
When will we have paid access back? You're still telling users that they have no such account, despite having an account, and refusing to let us login
This isn't rocket science here. Fix the paid portions of services first, then 'community' portions after!
Better yet, have proper systems put in place that provide redundancy
Talk about a nightmare. Customers cannot access services they paid for, because of your poorly run systems
If you're "downloading" this, you're doing it wrong
This only goes to show how backwards the mindset of SD is. While customers cannot access software because of pathetic choices, SD tries to make themselves look like the 'good guy'. You're not. You're not the victim. You are the big corporation that refused to properly back stuff up, and got taken down because of it.
Backing up my disks with Acronis takes forever because of that very thing: validation. I also was astounded just how long this process takes. Btw, thanks for your and the team's stick-to-itiveness. Being partially homeless makes one grateful for the monumental effort you all made. "Thank you" is hardly enough. Anything less is truly pathetic.
If you're "downloading" this, you're doing it wrongThis only goes to show how backwards the mindset of SD is. While customers cannot access software because of pathetic choices, SD tries to make themselves look like the 'good guy'. You're not. You're not the victim. You are the big corporation that refused to properly back stuff up, and got taken down because of it.
wow. What a miserable little man you are.
You should tell them what critical service is down. Fences, start11, windowblinds all working here.
All product activation was restored weeks ago.
Trying to access my account takes me in circles. I enter my email address and it sends me a link that supposedly takes me there, but only results in opening another page to enter my email, ad infinitum. Not only that but I was charged twice for an order and I have had zero luck reaching out to remedy this. I am about to initiate a dispute with my bank because nobody responds to my requests.
Support have been handling emails all the time so I am unsure why you seem to be having a problem.
Do you have a ticket ID from contacting support?
You should be able to get access to software from this link:
Stardock Network Issue - Documentation - Stardock Help Center
However, the specific account lookup site is still down. Hopefully it'll be up soon.
As frustrating as this may have been for us Stardock users, I am sure that pales in comparison to how everyone within the company felt. It is very nice that you took the time to be transparent with this post. I am glad to see mostly everything up and running again
I know the anxiety I feel when I do something stupid and cause my computer to crash, and not restart. My first anxious thought is that I'm going to have to rebuild everything from scratch! That's at least a week long task. Thankfully, I make image backups twice a week, and most of my files are backed up on OneDrive.
I can't imagine the anxiety that everyone at Stardock was feeling when things crashed. It must have been a nightmare!
I am so glad the restoration of the site(s) is taking shape. Most everything has been restored now, and I for one, am very appreciative of all the countless hours spent by the Stardock staff.
Three cheers to all!
OS/2? Never heard of it...
I have a boxed copy in my bookshelf...
Picture with a Hoovis or we don't believe you ! 😜
Sadly, that's not the whole box; just the top of it has survived, propped up on a bookshelf all this time...
Not only do I have a complete OS2 in the box... I also have a boxed Windowblinds ... and a GalCiv ...
......and XtreeGold too ...
Ah, a small person living a small life with a small brain hating on everyone who's better than him. Which is probably everyone.
Stardock, I can imagine exactly what you are going through and don't envy you but I do sympathize. A massive challenge and you seem to be doing great so far.It's a horrible world out there with some vile people doing vile things and while we don't know what happened exactly we can imagine it was pretty nasty. Keep up the good work and we'll remain patient!
Wait, is the OS/2 *running* in a box?
No, it's 'box' is the retail packaging. Last time it ran anywhere was quite some time ago.
A bit like having Dos 6.22 on 5 1/4" floppies .... in a box ... [I have them too]
Now that Stardock recovered from their total system outage, I decided to see if I could still sign in -- and I could -- even after not signing in for over 15 years!
So, mark Stardock dredging up its history, I have a question. Which version of Galactic Civilization started with a blond female news caster who's hair would change to black, depending upon your playstyle?
Backups are good. Testing restore procedures is even better...
Glad to hear that things are on the uptick, but man, that sucked. I'm dying to know what happened.
I remember that. I think it was the OS/2 version. IIRC, when you got really evil she also got an eye-patch.
That would be a feature to bring back maybe tie it to your warmonger rating as Four does not really have good vs evil
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