You may have noticed that between February 16th and 20th our websites were unexpectedly offline. During routine maintenance, our database became corrupted and required an emergency restoration. As of 10:30pm tonight (PST) our retail store, members site, and account dashboards are back online.
Three important points regarding this service disruption:
- All your information is secure and intact.
- There was no external interference (we weren’t hacked).
- All sales/streams through our partner platforms during this outage will be reported and accounted for.
I sincerely apologize for this unexpected disruption and want you to know that we always do everything we can to deliver the best service we can to you. If you would like further information, please read on.
Details about why CD Baby’s sites temporarily went offline
In order to be fully transparent, let me explain what happened and what was interrupted.
On the evening of Thursday, February 16 we took our servers offline for normal, scheduled maintenance. During that process, our database became corrupted and the initial database restoration failed. As you might imagine, a database serving 500,000 clients worldwide and seven million tracks is pretty big, so the successful restore process took quite a while. Because we couldn’t process data in the interim (such as CD sales or new album signups) our CD Baby retail and members sites remained offline for the duration of the emergency.
We’re now confident that your data has been restored and we’re relieved to be back online offering our market leading services to you again. If your music was already available through our distribution service, your fans would’ve still been able to access your tracks through our partner platforms. All sales and streams that occurred during the outage were not affected and you will be paid as normal.
Sorry for the inconvenience. We’re working to make sure this won’t happen again.
You, the artists and labels that we support, are the lifeblood of our community. We have an excellent staff and significant resources dedicated to supporting you and your music. In addition to the forty client support specialists who you can talk with (in English, Spanish or Portuguese), we have a technical team of thirty and a digital operations team of ten to make sure we get it right.
We will do everything we can to make sure we never see a disruption of this magnitude again.
Sincerely,
Tracy Maddux (CEO of CD Baby)