Soon after we posted that Alpha Media’s Newsday website was down this morning, a friend notified us there was something wrong with our website. We checked and sure enough all the articles were gone. No story at all, like it’s a new blog.
Thankfully, ours wasn’t a hacking problem. The problem was one of the main tables in our content database was corrupted. And fortunately, this is not a difficult problem to fix. It’s just that with our bad connectivity, it’s a nightmare to download the backup data (to be safe) and start uploading the data you need restored. It’s a slow exercise, but thankfully again, one we didn’t need to go through entirely to be back online.
Techzim is hosted in South Africa by a company called Afrihost. The actual WordPress site is managed by us.
There’s no evidence to suggest the database corruption was an attack by a hacker. In fact all the signs suggest the database was too busy at a certain point this morning and this contributed to the corruption. What we have learnt is that we need to change some things with the database technologies we use to make it more robust.
We apologize for being down and we’re thankful to the friends that alerted us to the problem.
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7 comments
I am intrigued by the reason for your outage earlier today, corrupted table??? Definitely the first time I have heard of a corrupted table! Corrupted database yes that happens quite often, but just a table, hmmm !!!
lol. corrupted table yes. All tables were fine except this one. Returned 0 rows even though it’s supposed to hold thousands of rows. Needed restoration/repair
lm going to take legal action against techzim for loss of entertainment this morning. I even tried contact us link and dead as well. Expect to hear from my lawyers soon!
really sorry @macdchip:disqus let’s settle it without the lawyers. how much?
Updating techzim with at least two interesting articles each day especially weekends without a failure for the next six months, l will take off two for good behaviour and another two if its not repeated in the next ten months.
deal!
l dont know much about running websites but l also thought it was not that serious if it was hacking because during that time it was down, l was able to access Q&S section normally, l tested all the functions and it looked ok.