**Incident date and time:** Sunday July 30, 2023, from approximately 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM (EDT)
**Duration:** 1 hour and 30 minutes
**Impact:** Users experienced an inability to access ChatKitty services during this time. All services, including chat functions and account management, were unavailable.
**Cause:** This incident was caused by an inadvertent operation performed on the production database. During routine development, a team member accidentally pointed their local chat-service instance at the production database and ran several main branch migrations against it. This resulted in the production database being put into an inconsistent state, leading to downtime.
**Resolution and Recovery:** Upon recognizing the issue, our team immediately took action to restore the production database from a backup. We manually synchronized the difference and then switched the database instances to get the service back up and running. Service was fully restored by approximately 12:30 PM (EDT).
**Corrective and Preventative Measures:** We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused to our users. To prevent similar incidents in the future, we are implementing new policies to segregate production resources from our main VPN. Furthermore, we will reinforce training for all team members on the critical importance of careful handling of database operations, especially when connected to the VPN.
We appreciate your understanding and patience. Your trust is important to us, and we are committed to improving our processes to ensure that our services are always available when you need them.
**Posted by:** ChatKitty Incident Management Team, July 30, 2023.