About the missing questions

For the last few days, a lot of anonymous questions weren't reaching people's inboxes. If it felt like the site went quiet, or like your questions stopped arriving, you weren't imagining it — and it wasn't anything you did wrong. We're sorry.

The short version: a change on our end accidentally caused about half of all anonymous questions to be silently held back instead of delivered. Nobody saw an error. People kept asking, but the questions weren't getting through, so there was much less to answer. That's the quiet you may have noticed.

It's fixed now. Anonymous questions are being delivered normally again.

We also went back and recovered most of the questions that were lost and delivered them to the right inboxes. We want to be honest about one thing here: our method for figuring out who each recovered question belonged to is very accurate, but not perfect. We checked it against questions where we already knew the right recipient, and it placed them correctly 99.2% of the time — which means a little under one in a hundred could land in the wrong person's inbox. We thought hard about that and decided to return them anyway, because the alternative was leaving thousands of real questions lost for good, and because these are anonymous — a misplaced one shows nobody's identity. If you get a recovered question that clearly wasn't meant for you, just delete it. Sorry for the mix-up if that happens.

A smaller number of questions couldn't be recovered. If someone told you they asked you something and it never showed up, just have them send it again — it'll come through fine now.

Thank you to the people who wrote in to say something felt off. You were right, and you helped us catch it.

— Ricky