Extended downtime Friday, 07 May due to database problems - some ingame items affected

Respected players

Today, Friday, 07 May, we encountered a database issue in EVE Online that resulted in the disappearing of items from some players that were logged in during a 75 minute period before the cluster was taken down.

The issue also affected some players that did not log in, but had outstanding buy orders or contracts that were acted on by other players during those 75 minutes.

The EVE Online cluster remained offline while we identified the error, investigated the database and ensured that the issue would not continue. 

Players that think they may have been affected are encouraged to file a petition listing items lost, so that our game masters can work to help them.

Further information...

Shortly after Tranquility started up after downtime on 7 May 2010, we noticed that players were having issues with items disappearing while doing market transactions, while unstacking items and during other "item-related" actions.

We identified the cause as an error in the running of a script which takes old itemIDs (each item has a unique ID number) from trashed items and reassigns them to new ones. Since that failed, newly created items were unable to receive itemIDs and this caused issues across several inventory-based systems.

In total, up to 114,000 itemIDs were potentially affected during the timeframe (11:28-12:43 GMT), which is 0.0071% of the total items.

Which players are affected by this issue?

Players who logged in during the timeframe:

·         A portion of players who, during the timeframe,  completed an action that resulted in certain types of inventory operations, such as unstacking items (but not stacking items onto an item that existed before 11:30 GMT), buying on the market, looting, mining, unloading ammunition, delivering science and industry jobs and deploying structures into space.

Players not logged in:

·         Those that had market buy orders fulfilled during the timeframe and whose orders were fulfilled by creating a new stack of items.

·         Those that had item exchange contracts fulfilled during the timeframe that dealt with WTB contracts or the exchange of one item for another. These cases are extremely rare.

CCP engineers made extensive reviews of the database, code and scripts to ensure the issue did not continue and brought Tranquility back online at 19:40 GMT

The items in question are lost, not having been assigned an itemID during the normal process.

Again, we will be working with those players who were affected as best as we can, and encourage them to petition in the reimbursement category.