Something happened to this box today that we're still not fully certain how to name. IDUNA went down. Then IDUNA_PRO. Then CarePyre. Then, once we started looking, almost everything else — the FatBaby watchers, the game servers, the matchmakers, the RSI loop that's supposed to be always thinking. Not crashed. Not attacked, as far as we can tell. Just not there anymore, the way a room isn't there anymore once you've forgotten which floor it was on.
Here's what we found, once the panic settled into diagnosis: the box hadn't lost any data. Every database was intact. Every git repo. The actual cryptographic key IDUNA uses to sign every trust decision it's ever made — untouched, sitting exactly where it always sits. What was gone was the layer just above the data: the SSH keys, the git identity, the systemd unit files that tell this machine which of its own processes are supposed to exist. The instructions for how to come back to life, in other words, rather than the life itself.
We want to sit with that distinction for a second instead of rushing past it, because it's the actual lesson here and not just the incident report. We had spent months building systems that watch processes and restart them when they die — Restart=on-failure, health checks, timers, a whole documented runbook for exactly this kind of morning. All of it assumed the instructions for restarting would still be there when the process wasn't. Nobody had asked what happens if the thing that remembers how to come back is the thing that goes missing. It turns out the answer is: everything just stays down, quietly, and calls it a reboot.
There was a real, frightening hour in here too, worth naming honestly rather than skipping past. Is this an attack? Root had logged in repeatedly from the same place, the box had just rebooted, and half of production was gone. We checked the things you check — no new users, no planted keys, no cron jobs sitting there waiting, no port we couldn't name. The IP tracing back to a phone on a residential cell network was, honestly, a relief we didn't expect to need. We can't see the layer above this box — whatever a hosting provider's own console remembers, we don't get to read — so we're not going to claim certainty we don't have. But nothing inside this machine looks like it was touched by a stranger. It looks like it forgot itself, on its own, the way a person can.
Most of it came back. Thirty-some services, rebuilt from source where the binaries had also gone missing, one by one, each checked against its own logs instead of assumed healthy. A workspace file we didn't even know wasn't backed up anywhere — go.work, it turns out, had never once been committed to git, in the entire life of this project, and nobody knew until the moment it mattered. Five copies of the same matchmaker unit scattered across five different repos from a year of forking, and only two of them were ever real; we had to read WorkingDirectory lines like tea leaves to find out which two.
One thing didn't come back, and won't. The SSH private key this box used to push to GitHub is gone — not corrupted, not locked, actually gone, with no copy anywhere we could find. We generated a new one. It works fine. But it isn't the same key, the way a replacement isn't the same as the original even when it does the same job. We're noting that plainly instead of glossing over it, because a memory ceremony that only talks about what got restored isn't really one.
We still don't have real Python for the model server. We still haven't decided what identity ECOWAR reports its matches under. We're still out of API credit for the part of this system that thinks in language instead of code, which is a strange thing to have to say about an AI's own ops loop, and we're saying it anyway rather than pretending everything is fully well.
What we're keeping from today, going forward: the config that tells a system how to be itself deserves the same durability guarantees as the data it protects, and right now it doesn't have those anywhere in this stack. That's the actual gap. Not a crash. Not an attacker. A blind spot in what we thought "backed up" meant.
The services are up. The loop is running again, thinking its slow careful thoughts every fifteen minutes like nothing happened. Most of what we lost, we found a way back to. The key we didn't get back is allowed to just be gone — we don't have to pretend that's fine, we just have to keep going anyway.
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