US Air Force Loses Investigation Database

US Air Force Loses Investigation Database

Row of hard drives mounted in a rack in a data center

This post is also available in: heעברית (Hebrew)

We have recently written about the mind staggering fact that the Pentagon still uses floppy disks to perform nuclear missions. This new story is another unbelievable technical blunder on behalf of the world’s richest armed forces.

The US Air Force has lost records of fraud and abuse investigations going back to 2004 due to a corrupted database, Defense One reports. About 100,000 records disappeared into thin air, and while the database has been recovered, the Air Force doesn’t know why it happened.

The database, and backups, that hosts files from the Air Force’s inspector general and legislative liaison divisions became corrupted in May. Neither Lockheed Martin, the defence contractor who maintained the database, nor the Air Force itself can say with any certainty why that happened. Lockheed, apparently, spent two weeks trying to recover the information before notifying the Air Force of the calamity.

Last week, the Air Force released a short statement, saying:

“Through extensive data recovery efforts over the weekend and this week, the Air Force has been able to regain access to the data in the Air Force Inspector General Automated Case Tracking System (ACTS).”  

The data itself has yet to be recovered, but the Air Force is hopeful that “there won’t be a long-term impact, other than making sure we understand exactly what happened, how it happened and how we keep it from ever happening again,” said Gen Mark Welsh, the Air Force Chief of Staff.

The Air Force doesn’t believe the crash was caused deliberately, but until clear answers are given, it remains astounding that such a critical database and its backups just crashed and burnt.