I'll keep this short (hopefully).

One of the AI mission addons we use is very very old. The author abandoned it long ago. It still works 90% of the time but needed work doing.
Someone on the Epoch forums updated it and I watched them slowly but surely fix and improve things. So I decided now (yesterday evening) was as good a time as anyway to try it.
I backed up the currently working files but forget about the database and installed the new mission/AI mod.

It seemed to work fine but after an hour players start complaining that their purchased vehicles weren't spawning at traders.
I then started to notice that the vehicles I spawned with the Admin tools would appear then vanish.

After some digging, I figured it was (probably) the new mod. There's a setting in the mod that adds the vehicles it spawns to the database so they persist after restart and players can keep them.
That was my best guess, the database was struggling with the constant queries as missions were spawned and players moved mission vehicles around.

So I switched the server off and rolled back to the old files. (Whether the problem is fixed remains to be seen. No doubt I'll get reports off players tonight. If it's not fixed, it's a problem caused by our server provider.)

However, the database would still be bloated from the excess vehicles spawned. (This would affect trader speeds.)

I ran some commands on the database that were supposed to remove dead players, vehicles that hadn't been moved in more than 30 days, destroyed vehicles, players that hadn't logged in for more than 60 days, etc.
Obviously something went wrong in there as we lost the walls around Stary and several players certain lost walls and floors.

So yeah, my apologies for that. Lesson learned: backup the damn database more often.

Some good did come out of all this though. I discovered a way to make the traders load prices from the game files rather than the database. Which could result in faster trading and trade menus.
I'll discuss it with BioHazard later as he handles the traders, their prices and their stock.

Thanks for being honest, and providing an explanation when you really didn't have to.

Think most of us weren't angry, but rather just taken back to find our bases were exposed and open to looting, luckily most of us log on regular though and were able to patch it up quickly.

So don't worry about it, these things happen. Hopefully if any other bases remain open and exposed on the map, people are decent and leave them be.

Yeah I thought I'd clear it up as I was monitoring the chat remotely and noticed some speculation regarding hackers, other players, various types of betrayal, broken mods etc.