Today, From Dick Eastman>>>>> Ancestry Concedes Defeat as It is Unable to Restore All of the RootsWeb Site Ancestry has been trying for weeks to fix a data loss in its RootsWeb/USGenWeb/WorldConnect web pages. The company has been able to repair many of the lost pages but not all. In fact, the company is asking customers to upload any pages they may have available. The company also promised, “Going forward, we are adding additional technical resources to support the site and ensure such an issue does not occur again.” Ancestry sent the following announcement to many of its customers today: As you may know, the RootsWeb site was recently unavailable as the result of a hardware failure in our datacenter. Our development and web operations teams worked diligently and carefully to address the issues, and as a result, the site is now available again. Regretfully, despite their best efforts, our teams were not able to retrieve all of the data associated with the site. Specifically, we were unable to retrieve content from FreePages added after the summer of 2015. We understand these pages are important to you and are very sorry that we are not able to recover the data that was lost as a result of the hardware failure. Going forward, we are adding additional technical resources to support the site and ensure such an issue does not occur again. If you have a backup of your own please upload it to the site so that you have the most current version of your pages. If you have any concerns, please contact our Member Services through our support form. The RootsWeb Team Comments? Post way below, here>>> http://blog.eogn.com/2016/03/28/ancestry-concedes-defeat-as-it-is-unable-to-restore-all-of-the-rootsweb-site/#more-12655 Barb MizScarlettNY@aol.com

So in a nutshell, Ancestry did indeed have a hardware failure, and this wasn't some nefarious plot on Ancestry's part to do in the Rootsweb community. And the lesson here is that fearmongering, assuming the worst intentions of Ancestry based on nothing, and hating on Ancestry just because it is Ancestry all turned out to be egg on the faces of those people spreading the FUD. There are certainly reasons to be pissed at Ancestry, from time to time, and for things they've done in the past. This wasn't one of them, and I am personally glad I didn't jump on some bandwagon vilifying Ancestry.