To be clear, we lost six hours of data. Not something we're proud of at all, but I figured an exact number would be useful.

Also to be clear GitLab (apparently) didn't lose any data actually stored in git from that timeframe, "just" the data stored via GitLab itself (issues, wikis, etc).

It's of course still bad because GitLab makes a big deal of being about the "whole package" rather than just version control, but it's not the massive potential for intellectual property loss "six hours of data" implies for what most think of primarily as a git hosting service.

Not quite. I coincidentally signed up for a GitLab account that very day, at that very time period, to make a minor change to someone else's project. I (1) set up my account, (2) forked their project, (3) made the change, and (4) issued a pull request. Came back the next day and none of that was there, including my forked git repo. I had to do it all over again, and it was clear it was a clean wipeout of everything, because I was allowed to re-register with the exact same userid, etc. I know that is a rare-snowflake event, but the fact I had a repo and had even sent a pull request from it shows they did, in fact, lose some data in git itself.

The git data itself was untouched, but in the eyes of the DB there was no project that got created due to the lost DB data, so the git repo isn't hooked up. If you can give me the username and project name I can have support fix it up for you.

If you don't want to do that in this thread, feel free to email me: connor at gitlab.com

It's all good. I just replicated all the work (setting up the account, my forked repo, the change, my pull request) the next day.