Linear experienced a significant data loss incident on January 24, 2024, due to a database migration error that resulted in the accidental deletion of production data. The incident, which lasted about five hours, required Linear to go offline for an hour, affecting users, particularly in the EU, who made changes during the window. The restoration process was completed within 36 hours, recovering over 99% of the lost data, although some conflicts could not be resolved. The incident was caused by a cascade operation in a database migration that inadvertently deleted data from several tables, leading to synchronization issues. Linear's recovery efforts involved restoring data from the latest backup and utilizing sync packets to recover changes made during the outage. The company acknowledged the shortcomings in their processes and committed to improving their tools and procedures to prevent future incidents, including better database migration practices and enhanced monitoring to ensure data integrity.