A casual Substack nightmare
Lucy Werner: Back up your work! [#188]
It’s all go on Substack this week. Lucy Werner at
deleted her podcast, and a glitch in the system meant it wiped everything.All her subscribers. All posts. All gone.
Her Stripe account is still working, but they can’t fully restore the data. As well as losing her email list, she’s lost over 220 publications who recommended her, a large chunk of her growth. She had a Top 50 business newsletter with nearly 13k+ subscribers.
What a fucker. She’s asked for an investigation, and I hope she gets an explanation (and all of us - it’s a worry). A public apology would go a long way. Communication = trust. Apparently, a similar thing happened to Chelsey Pippin Mizzi, where it wiped her posts. I saw a note about someone else last night, so it’s not a one-off incident.
More big creators are coming to Substack - Justin Welsh, Jay Clouse, Dan Koe. Many people are running businesses and investing a lot of time and energy here. I wonder if these glitches are caused by the speed of growth and rollout of new features. Stuff happens, but things also need testing thoroughly to sort out any issues.
Lucy didn’t do anything wrong - she was just trying to delete her podcast, so this is a system error. I’m not touching my Podcast settings until they tell us the problem.
Lucy has written about it here and is sharing her journey on Notes. She’s rebuilding her publication from scratch - the Hype Yourself 2.0 Greatest Hits (A-Z best of her archive).
It’s a wake-up call to back up your work regularly (whatever platform you’re on) and export your mailing list. Substack is awesome but not infallible. What if they were hacked!? Everybody’s being hacked. I popped into my local Co-op last night, and the shelves are still empty because of the cyberattacks.
I just exported my list and all my posts (at least we can do that now). I use a Chrome extension called GoFullPage to capture PDFs. I’ve set a calendar reminder to back up on 1st month.
I know Seth, and I have my own website, but I don’t want to duplicate posts and nobody reads websites. I have a blog + newsletter here and a custom domain.
Sending you a virtual hug, Lucy. I’m sorry this happened to you, and I know how it feels. I deleted my WordPress blog with a dodgy plugin/update, and luckily, they could restore part of it. It’s exhausting having to start over.
It’s been great seeing the community rallying around to help her. I offered to send her my emails (one benefit of never deleting anything).
has made the Substack Safety Kit, which is super useful.Give Lucy some love, and sign up for her newsletter if you feel like it. I’ve been inspired by her self-employed journey from PR agency owner in London to Substack writer in rural France. She has to hype herself to get back to starting point - let alone grow.
I sent her Mark Master’s article about when he deleted his entire database by mistake and had no backup. Project Mayhem! He rebuilt it with the help of his community.
Losing my list showed me what I already knew deep down: audience size means nothing if the connection isn’t there.
You don’t need a massive list. You just need the right people.
His event, YATM Creator Day, is on 15 May if you fancy a day of creativity and networking in sunny Poole. See the full schedule.
Also seen on Substack this week… the official account of the
- sharing the voices of principals across the State Department. It’s properly mainstream now ;) Will we see the DCMS here soon?Nika
PS I’m offering mentoring to help creators + brands show up on Substack. I’ve been helping my NUJ colleagues and really enjoying it. It’s a 45-minute Zoom call and follow-up support via email for a month. More info here.
Only just got a minute at my desk to see this. Thank you so much for sharing and building awareness. I just hope my story helps others save their work. Really appreciate the support.
"What if they were hacked!? Everybody’s being hacked. I popped into my local Co-op last night, and the shelves are still empty because of the cyberattacks."
That's just for starters: this issue may get worse. When more advanced AI is used by hackers, bank accounts and the databases controlling smart meters for electricity etc (which send and receive meter readings and credit status by RF data transmissions) will increasingly become vulnerable.
If they use mobile phone repeaters, then they will become vulnerable to "man-in-the-middle attacks" (where bogus mobile or wifi networks operating from a mobile van pretend to be your bank, or other secure service, to intercept login data etc), and the final level is EMP attacks to cause power blackouts.
EMP was first fully documented and demonstrated as a weapon by a series of Russian high altitude 300kt yield tests at heights of up to 300km over Kazakhstan during the Cuban missiles crisis; power and communications lines over 500 km long were shut down by large induced direct currents, and the attached electric power plant at Karaganda was burned down due to DC overload of transformers.
As the recent power blackouts across the iberian peninsula showed, you can't buy food even with cash when the tills in the supermarket are powered off, you can't get cash when the cashpoints have no power, you can't watch tv, use the microwave, or boil the kettle. You can't use your phone for communications, or even as a torch or games console when the battery runs out and you can't recharge. There's a lot of dependence on technology, and just about everything is vulnerable to a prolonged blackout. At the best of times, the delivery times for large custom-made, high-current, oil-cooled replacement power transformers can be six months. If a huge number are needed and society is totally disrupted by the chaos, it would be like the stone age for years.