On Friday morning, Malaysiakini encountered technical difficulties that resulted in the editorial team being unable to upload new stories to the website.

The problem was due to a catastrophic hardware failure of our content database server.

Working with our cloud hosting providers, the technology team managed to gain access to the content database, but were unable to fully recover the database. Unfortunately, the backups were also not usable.

In order to keep the stories flowing, new Malaysiakini stories were published on Malaysiakini's English, BM and Chinese Facebook pages.

Our technology team is working around the clock to put together a system that will support the website’s core publishing functions.

Publishing on the website will resumed soon, although some functions may not be fully operational. We estimate it will take 10 to 14 days to make a full recovery.

We will investigate what caused the hardware and database failure, the first time such an event has occurred in Malaysiakini's 16 years of publishing online. As of now, there is no indication that foul play was involved.

Malaysiakini apologises to our readers and subscribers for the outage.