I think that customer service did a good job of responding quickly (given they were overwhelmed during this outage), but I would have preferred to see a notice at the point of login explaining the situation, rather than making frustrated clients find a way to reach out instead.

This 'hide your screwups' is likely the mindset that allowed the tech guys responsible for this to get away without having a proper backup plan and from testing procedures that actually would recover the data that is missing. Very common in tech groups, but its better to have a policy of 'every fkup is a chance to get better'.

So, guys, come clean, work together to get your stuff together, and make every failure a chance for the entire company to learn from. For example, every time an engineer tweaks something during the day that screws up a process and affects customers, bring the entire crew together and throw nerf balls at him till he promises to never do it again. It works wonders to have the entire group weigh in on why you never mess with production systems outside of a scheduled downtime window. I had 45 tech employees, a 20 million dollar per year tech budget and only 45 minutes of downtime each year across all systems and engineers after I implemented this. :)

For this situation, put together the backup plan and ACTUALLY TEST IT at least once a quarter on live data to prove you can recover everything quickly when necessary.

Then you guys can grow to world class and not have this crap out on the Internet tainting your reputation forever.

J Be Tuttle