We’re writing to inform you about an incident that impacted your index on the Starter (free) plan.

At 15:00 EST today, a script meant to delete inactive indexes in the Starter (free) tier was inadvertently run on certain active indexes on the Starter (free) plan. Our engineering team immediately halted index operations to investigate the issue.

At 16:30 EST all operations returned to normal. A large fraction of the affected indexes were restored. Indexes and operations for users on paid plans (Standard, Enterprise, or Enterprise Dedicated) were not affected.

According to our logs, unfortunately your index was deleted by the script. Our engineers were able to recover some indexes already. We are still working on recovering the rest. At this point, we cannot guarantee we will be able to recover all indexes.

We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience caused by this incident. While our Starter (free) tier is offered without availability guarantees, we recognize there are many free users who nonetheless depend on Pinecone to power their applications and projects. Earning and keeping your trust is a top priority for us, which is why we’re committed to making this right.

Here are the steps we’re taking:

We are continuing work to restore as many affected indexes as possible. There is no action needed on your behalf. We will share a detailed post-mortem in a few days, also outlining steps we’ve taken to prevent such incidents in the future. We are increasing your pod limit on the Starter (free) plan to 3 pods (from 1). As a result, if you choose to recreate your index yourself, it will not interfere with the restoration efforts. You do not have to do anything to get this benefit. We are offering $100 in credits for affected users who wish to upgrade to a paid plan, which is recommended for production applications. We will automatically apply this credit to you when you upgrade in the next 30 days. There is no need to notify us or ask for the credits. At the end of the billing cycle, you will simply not be charged for the first $100 of usage. We will continue to promptly share any updates related to this incident with you. Once again, we deeply regret this incident and will continue working hard to make it right. If you have any questions or concerns you can reply to this email ([email protected]) or contact your Customer Success Engineer directly. For the latest system status visit our status page.

— Team Pinecone