RIPE DB service restored

Dear Nils,
sorry to hear we have caused you some much problems.
As the situation was we needed to perform an emergency shutdown of the
update process to prevent corruption of the database after we detected
some problems after a system crash.
We did try to reach the community by sending out a mail to db-wg. 
We later realized that, contrary to the norm, we did not cc the lir-wg.
We did send out a message (included below) to the lir-wg a few hours later
trying to correct the situation. We realize this not what should have been
done, but we are humans.
During the outage, our home page (http://www.ripe.net) also had a note
notifying the event.
We do our best to try to keep a good service running and inform everyone
affected when it is not possible to do so.
What we mean by the reply you got from ncc at ripe.net is that mailbox
replies only to requests and does not spam everyone. We use several wg
lists to try to reach the interested parties.

I hope you will accept our apologies and we promise to work harder to
avoid circumstances like this in the future.

********** Begin included message
Dear Colleagues,

Due to a regretable  oversight, the following message was not sent to this 
list last night.

Due to a crash of our whois server, we had to stop the updates and
re-index 
the data. 

There is no need to resend your updates. The updates are queued and they 
will be processed later.  We are also going to upgrade the main server so 
that it can cope better with the ever growing load.

The whois query service has been switched to our backup server, therefore 
the response time is slower than usual.

The latest news is that the re-indexing process has finished and we are 
currently working on the main server itself.  We anticipate that the full 
service will be restored sometime later today.  We shall keep you
informed.

If you have anymore questions, please contact
<ripe-dbm at ripe.net>.

Regards,

A. M. R. Magee
______________
RIPE NCC 

********** End included message


Yours sincerely,
Joao Damas
Head of external services
RIPE NCC