On Wednesday, February 13, from 9:30 to 11:30 Pacific Time, Planning Center was having some issues related to permissions. What was up with that?
Short answer: we messed up! In the process of making some other improvements to the site, we accidentally made a change that upgraded some people permissions. Those people all of the sudden had administrator permissions and would have been able to make changes that their real permissions didn't allow. Luckily, we caught this error almost immediately, and to make sure all accounts stayed secure, we took the site down so we could come up with a plan of action.
While the site was down, we downgraded all permissions to Scheduled Viewer which meant everyone would be able to see what they were scheduled for but make no changes. This would at least allow everyone limited access to their Planning Center accounts without posing any security risks. Once those permissions had been downgraded, we brought the site back up and posted a notice in Planning Center and on our Facebook and Twitter pages. The site was down for 20 minutes while those permissions were being downgraded.
After the site was back up, we contacted our server facility to get a backup of all the permissions. Retrieving that backup and restoring all the permissions is what took the rest of the time, but as of 11:35 PST all permissions had been restored to normal and no data was lost.
We know how much you rely on Planning Center and we have a very large number of measures in place to prevent issues like this from arising. We appreciate your understanding and patience in this matter and want you to know how seriously we take these matters. Thanks for your continued support and make sure you follow us on Facebook and Twitter to have the latest updates including timely information on issues and outages.