Hello,
As I've promised in the very brief error message, I am going to explain what happened and why it took us two days to get the avast! Forum back.
Neither our forum nor our provider was hacked or DDOSed. The forum is currently hosted on our own servers, connected to our own network (we have our own AS numbers and peerings) in our rack, currently in our HQ in Prague.
On Monday morning, the forum server crashed during backup, and it unfortunately somehow corrupted the mapped iscsi volume with the forum data (we are investigating with the vendor how that could happen). What was worse, the backup iscsi volume also was mapped to the forum server and corrupted. So, because of this, we didn't have a fresh (few hours old) backup to restore. We had only a backup a few weeks old.
However, I found that it would be possible to get access to the freshest (online) data from the time when the server crashed. Because of this, I didn't restore the old backup and waited to see how the restoration would finish. Fortunately, it finished OK, so we now have the forum back as it was on Monday morning, just before crash.
I was called on Monday around 11:00 that the forum was not behaving normally, and it took approximately two hours to investigate what exactly was wrong. Some eight hours I was trying to find out how we could fix it by ourselves, then I contacted the vendor. That was the most time-intensive aspect, and after a few e-mails we managed to fix the iscsi volumes. That was some 30 minutes ago.
I apologize for all the troubles,
Petr Chocholous
jabber/xmpp: chocholous at avast.com
email: chocholous at avast.com
IT crowd
AVAST Software a.s.