14 DAY TRIAL // The US Air Force announced last Friday that it lost over 100,000 records containing official investigations, complaints, appeals, and others, due to an error in its database.
The affected database belongs to the Air Force Inspector General's Office and serviced the Automated Case Tracking System (ACTS), a digital system for keeping track of legal investigations into complaints or other acts of whistleblowing from the Air Force's staff.
"The database crashed and there is no data," Ann Stefanak, Air Force Media Operations at the Pentagon, told the press in an emailed statement. "At this time we don't have any evidence of malicious intent."
Database backups also corrupted
Stefanak says the incident happened on June 6, last Monday, when a contractor who was managing the database notified the Air Force of the issue, describing the data as "corrupted."
A further investigation by the contractor, Lockheed Martin, revealed that the database's backups were also affected and that there's no way to recover any data from past backups.
The ACTS contained case information dating back to 2004. While the database mostly included historical and archived data, the Air Force lost details on current investigations as well.
Air Force officials admit they've exhausted all means to recover the data and are now considering alternative solutions such as looking for ACTS backups stored off-site, or bringing in third-party companies and letting them have a go at recovering the data.
Some data was lost for good, some not
The ACTS is also used to track high-level investigations such as congressional and constituent inquiries. This data is safe because it was stored in a separate database, also part of the ACTS system.
Information on sexual assaults was lost, but officials say this data was also backed up in another database.
Besides work disputes, the ACTS also contained Freedom of Information Act requests to release government data to the public. Historical data on these requests has been lost, officials add.