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CD Baby back online after four day outage

By | Published on Tuesday 21 February 2017

CD Baby

CD Baby managed to restore its service at around 5am UK time this morning, after being out of action since last Thursday.

As previously reported, the music distributor said on Sunday that it had discovered a database issue while conducting routine maintenance last week, leading to the prolonged outage. No new music could be distributed to digital services via the platform during the downtime, and users were unable to access their data and analytics. Though the company has assured its customers that it was not hacked and that all data remains safe.

After getting the system back online this morning, CD Baby CEO Tracy Maddux said in a statement: “On the evening of Thursday, 16 Feb, we took our servers offline for normal, scheduled maintenance. During that process, our database became corrupted and the initial database restoration failed”.

He went on: “As you might imagine, a database serving 500,000 clients worldwide and seven million tracks is pretty big, so the successful restore process took quite a while. Because we couldn’t process data in the interim – such as CD sales or new album signups – our CD Baby retail and members sites remained offline for the duration of the emergency”.

“We’re now confident that your data has been restored and we’re relieved to be back online offering our market leading services to you again”, he continued. “If your music was already available through our distribution service, your fans would’ve still been able to access your tracks through our partner platforms. All sales and streams that occurred during the outage were not affected and you will be paid as normal”.

He added that the company is now “working to make sure this won’t happen again”, though exactly what safeguards are being put in place is not yet clear.

CD Baby’s parent company, AVL Digital, which acquired the independent music distribution service in 2008, was sold to private equity group Stephen Capital Partners in 2013. More recently, it relaunched the Soundrop brand as a YouTuber-focused distribution service earlier this month, having acquired its owner, Show.co, last November.



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