If you’re using Contacts on Ovi you may find that things aren’t all they seem to be at the moment. It seems there was a system crash yesterday that led to the database breaking down.

The guys over at Ovi have been completely open about this potential disaster, even going into detail about how they’ve tried to rectify the situation .

If you’re using Contacts on Ovi then you’ll find that stuff you’ve out in since 23rd Jan may not be there. This is due to a system failure with database over at Ovi. However, rather than cover up the problem, an open apology to all Nokia users from Kristian Luoma, Product Manager, Contacts on Ovi over at Beta Labs explained the error:

‘A cooler broke down in the hosting center that we run the Chat service in. This event lead in to two catastrophic consequences from our point of view. Firstly we had to ramp down the service down for a very long period, in fact most of the yesterday morning and afternoon we had a service break. Secondly, our database broke down. Despite the fact that we had regular back-ups, we were not able to set it right.’

He goes on to openly and clearly explain what went wrong and how they went about repairing the damage. While this is a timely reminder that relying on anyone else to look after your vital data can and will have ramifications in the real world, it’s gratifying to see a large corporation like Nokia taking it on the chin and explaining they’d messed up.  How many other companies would openly apologise to its users like this?

No, we’re not too sure why the puppy is on the page either – we just hope it wasn’t shot to appease some ancient database diety.