By: Croblade & Choppyhausen

On January 27th, NationStates suffered a data breach that allowed a (now Delete-on-Sight) player to gain access to the official servers and copy the entire user data of millions of nations, giving site admins no choice but to shut down NationStates for the next eleven days pending security updates. To address the possibility of multiple nations ceasing to exist during a time where nobody could prevent their nation from doing so, the CTE timer for nations was temporarily suspended and and then an additional twenty seven days were added to the timer. This was meant to give adequate time after the data breach to log in and change passwords. Since February 8th, [violet] and other admins reassured players that the timer would “be sliding [...] slowly back down to twenty eight over a number of weeks. Unfortunately, players would soon be blindsided by a critical M/A mishap:

“Oof, we accidentally reset the timer and didn't notice before update. So we have forcibly jumped back to the default. Apologies for the inconvenience.” - [violet], March 27th

The subsequent update ran on for an excruciating nine hours as it made its way through tens of thousands of nations completely unprepared for their demise. An apocalyptic event we have dubbed “Bloody Friday”.

Within the first hour and a half, over 6,000 nations had been lost, most conspicuously in restorers such as Osiris and Lazarus, the latter of which took incredibly long to update thanks to the volume of CTEs being processed. Additionally, because site admins also disabled CTE warning emails due to the large number of password reset emails being sent out, active players were also subject to the carnage. In the end, more than 40,000 nations had ceased to exist. Among them were around 2,000 World Assembly members, bringing the site down to 15,400 WAs, the lowest number recorded since 2014.

Many regions lost a large amount of delegate endorsements, as many as seventy, a chilling security scare for regional governments that couldn’t be sure that more of the same wasn’t inbound at the next major update. On average, most major regions dropped around 10% of their WA Delegate endorsements. The purge ravaged regions with high endorsement levels like the North and West Pacific the most, with TNP’s delegate Halsoni losing around seventy endorsements and TWP’s delegate Varanius losing more than fifty. The League, on the other hand, which had transitioned their delegacy just a week ago, lost less than 4% of their endorsements.

On a lighter note, Chicken Overlords, a region that only has nations in the most technical possible sense, lost 6,000 nations, mainly from the infamous womble puppet series, much to the delight of players who have had to deal with their impact on recruitment efforts and update time for the past several years. This now makes Balder the largest region in the game when measured by total population, although it seems like the “repopulation” of CO is already on its way.

Governments across the world are now searching for ways to regain their former strength. Primarch Rhaza addressed Perdition’s citizens with a series of measures in regards to the events of March 27th. Members of the Illuminated can find this thread in Perdition’s off-site forum. Which steps will prove to be the most successful and which regions will recover the fastest? Only the future will be able to answer these questions.