MeetFighters News
MeetFighters Outage Update: Technical Issue Resolved, No Data Breach
Dear All,
You may have noticed that MeetFighters was offline for over 24 hours. To clarify, this was purely a technical issue and a failure of the cooling system at the data center. It was not a data breach; no data was accessed, and the outage affected thousands of servers and websites, not just MeetFighters. For transparency and to clear up any rumors, here’s what we know and what we will do now:
- Outage Timing: Our server went down in the early morning of September 2nd, European time.
- Data Center Issues: Along with our server, many major components of the data center provider's infrastructure also went down, including their ticket system and admin dashboard control systems.
- Cause of the Outage: Shortly after, the data center confirmed a major outage at one of their locations, affecting all servers and customers hosted there. The cause was identified as a significant cooling issue. Again, this was not a data breach, and no data was accessed.
- Data Security: Even when the server is offline, the entire MeetFighters server is fully encrypted, and certain sensitive information within the database is additionally encrypted. This ensures that your data remains secure at all times.
- Domain Forwarding: About two hours after the outage, we forwarded the MeetFighters domain to our ticket site to provide you with updates as best we could. You can still view the history here: https://www.cmwf-services.com/meetfighters-outage.
- Transparency Note: "CMWF Services" is not the data center provider. It is our company that runs MeetFighters and handles invoices (if you contribute to us). It is 100% owned by me, and CMWF stands for Chat-Meet-Watch-Fighters. You may have seen this in our site footers and TAX invoices over the years.
- Alternative Chat Provided: On the news ticket page, we offered an alternative chat on our new site, MeetKink.com. As most of you know, MeetKink is our latest website, introduced earlier this year.
- Clarification: We did not take MeetFighters offline to promote MeetKink. However, we did use MeetKink's chat to provide a place for you to connect while the situation with the MeetFighters server was still unclear. We also used this chat to provide additional information and to answer your questions.
- Backup Preparations: We began preparing for the worst-case scenario of restoring MeetFighters from our offsite backups—fortunately, this wasn’t necessary.
- Future Resilience: To improve our resilience in the future, we will evaluate the additional costs of implementing an automatic or at least manual failover in another data center, ready to take over if something like this happens again.
- Future Plans: The data center still has ongoing issues, and we are unsure if the cooling system has been fully fixed. Unfortunately, the poor communication and the fact that a data center was offline for over 24 hours have resulted in a massive loss of trust. Therefore, we will be moving MeetFighters to one of our other data center operations, which already host our other websites. This transition will take place over the coming weeks and will result in a very short downtime, which we will announce in advance.
We deeply apologize to everyone who had planned a match yesterday and struggled to communicate. A full day outage is extremely rare and has never happened in the history of MeetFighters. We understand how frustrating this was and are committed to preventing such issues in the future.
Best Regards,
Admin
Basildon Bloke (15)
03/9/2024 13:14Unfortunately, these things happen and you all do a great job with the running of the site.
Thanks for all your hard work in getting it up and running again.
Redmond40 (156)
03/9/2024 13:32Thank you for the comprehensive report 👍🏻
Steeleyes (41)
03/9/2024 13:55It must have been very stressful for you Admin,well done for keeping members informed,Joe(Steeleyes)
Blazer (30 )
03/9/2024 14:29Thank you for your updates during the outage and downtime of the site yesterday. Helped us to not feel abandoned. Glad problem solved and site back online. All the best for continued success!
Rohith Kumar (74 )
03/9/2024 15:36Thanks for the update...wish you well. keep up the good work..
UP For It (0)
03/9/2024 16:01You handled this with a great deal of promptness and professionalism. The communication with the members made a tremendous difference. Thank you.
scubafighter (3)
03/9/2024 16:59"failure of the cooling system" Translation... Chat got so HOT it melted the main server. lol
Fighter Gary (24 )
03/9/2024 18:06I noticed that during the outage of meetfighters I was still able to access watchfighters on watchfighters.com. So either a different data center is used for that or the cooling issue did not affect those applications?
Admin
03/9/2024 23:11(C'est une réponse)
Correct, WF is at another provider, same for MK and CF. As far as we know, the whole data center location went down.
NCStarfox (10)
04/9/2024 00:53Great communication from your whole admin team. Frustrating to be sure, but we appreciate everything y'all do for us and this community, and this debrief (mmmhhmmmmm i said it) was great too. Thanks again!
AgentPoseidon (32)
04/9/2024 02:47I respect the fact you stayed in communication until it was back up and frankly it's the only outage in many many years I've been on this site. I work in IT so I understand outages. Thanks for the reassurance on data security, which isn't even a factor in most web outages.
I would however like to make a constructive suggestion you use your real first name on a message like this. Admin seems a little impersonal given you are talking about your business and how much you care about it directly to the stakeholders like myself who also create content on WatchFighters and have created profiles on all your sites.
Scott <--- my real first name. Not asking for something I don't do myself. Thanks.
Admin
04/9/2024 15:08(C'est une réponse)
Regarding why I stay anonym - for now:
I’ve often thought about revealing my personal account or using my real name. In fact, there was a time when my real name appeared on invoices because it was legally required. This is one of the reasons why we transitioned to operating as a company.
However, it's not as straightforward as it might seem. The internet can be unpredictable, and communities like MeetFighters, particularly within niche groups like gay communities, tend to attract their fair share of hostility. We regularly have to ban or sanction members, and we frequently receive threatening emails, face potential lawsuits, and deal with individuals trying to bring us down — all part of the anonymity the internet allows.
One particularly interesting incident involved a fake legal threat, where someone forged the signature of a U.S. judge in an attempt to have their account reinstated. The situation escalated quickly — I even received a phone call and ended up sending an email to the actual FBI from [email protected]. Honestly, what was this person thinking? No judge in the world would sign a court order within three hours to reverse a ban on a random website, especially one based outside the U.S.
We actually contacted the judge's office to confirm the forgery, and weeks later, the FBI called back, showing genuine interest in finding out who had gone to such lengths to fake a judge's signature. While it backfired on the user (apparently this was not the first time this guy faked a Judge signature and court order), this incident served as a stark reminder of the lengths some people will go to, even for something as trivial as getting unbanned from a website.
The reality is, some individuals can be quite short-sighted or even reckless, and I wouldn’t want anyone with bad intentions showing up at my doorstep. While I do contemplate revealing my identity from time to time, it’s a decision I haven’t made lightly. While it could add a more personal touch to the admin role, there’s a balance to be struck between transparency and personal safety.
At the end of the day, if someone is determined enough, they might be able to discover my identity — but I don’t see a reason to make it easy by serving it on a silver platter. I might at some point. Some people do know me, but that was by my choice.
AgentPoseidon (32)
09/9/2024 00:37(C'est une réponse)
Thanks for elaborating. It was interesting to hear more about you.
mikelightfight (1)
04/9/2024 08:28Very interesting and comprehensive report.
Thank you
boston kid (75)
04/9/2024 14:46Thank you for that. I’m really impressed by how you kept us all informed. You do a great job - and I appreciate that hugely. Best wishes
Admin
04/9/2024 15:10Thank you all for the kind words and the thumbs up! I truly appreciate it. I hoped the news ticker during the outage would be well-received, and it’s great to see that your feedback confirms we made the right decision. Thank you!
Tapout15 (0)
05/9/2024 20:12You handled the outage well, speed of information and keeping us updated.
edscissors (31 )
08/9/2024 01:38It must have been a frustrating time for you, Admin, let down so badly by people you'd trusted to provide infrastructure to support your site which is always fun so professionally. Thank you for doing your best to keep us updated throughout the unfortunate - and unprecedentedly prolonged - incident.
As far as giving out your own name is concerned, I respect your position. The story you recount - mad, spurious threat of judicial intervention - justifies your decision. Despite your "sine nomine" persona, the great thing is that you still manage to make the site a warm, personal place. Whenever I've contacted you/your Admin team, the (anonymous) response has always been warm, efficient, personal.
Thank you!