It seems that, at some point, Valve has clamped requests for the GetPlayerSummaries Web API. This has become a bit of a thorn.

Traditionally, backpack.tf would call this API on every profile refresh on a per-user basis, caching the results for a few minutes at a time. It was fine at first, but as demand grew, we now need to perform these calls several times a second. But alas, there's a lot of things we should have done differently ten years ago. We have been, for a while, exceeding the request limit on this endpoint, which seems to have been lowered.

Recently, we have begun batching these requests into fewer calls that run in the background. The caveat of this, is that profiles will not update immediately. Thus, completely new, unseen profiles were exempt from this behaviour -- this is so you can at least fetch a username for accounts we've never seen before.

However, we've still run into exhaustion problems. Exacerbating the problem are web spiders crawling pages that nobody cares about; typically, profiles of users who never use the website or play the game. We kind of want these pages to be crawled anyway, but the prior solution would likely add many extra GetPlayerSummaries calls we don't want. Today, I removed that exception so these, too, get pooled into the backend job.

And still, we're sitting here with a slowly incrementing backlog of profiles we'd like to parse.

Luckily, this information isn't too important -- the data we fetch from GetPlayerSummaries includes usernames, avatars and profile privacy statii. That's mostly it. However, we are aware some new users are having difficulty accessing the site. There's not much we can do about it, at the moment.

Hopefully, this problem will go away on its own. We'll update if there's any progress.

-- backpack.tf staff

I'm aware there's been some discussion around whether or not we will transfer donations made on gladiator bots given that they are being taken offline. We've discussed internally and the consensus is that it would not be especially fair to people who have similarly donated on bots in the past, for example with bot.tf bots, who did not get their donation credit back on their accounts when the site closed. If you donate on an account you do not own, you are taking the risk that the site closes, the bot owner runs, the bot gets hacked, etc, and we don't want to encourage people ignoring this risk purely for the sake of the site getting more donations.

However, we have decided that as a gesture of sympathy we are willing to transfer recent bot donations for the users who lost items in the exploit. This is an exception to our normal way of working, since this is an unusual situation that has been awful for many in the community. If you feel this applies to you, you can open a ticket in the issue tracker inquiries section. Please include some evidence that you lost items during recent events. If you have already opened a ticket requesting a donation transfer, please amend it to include proof of the above or it will be closed. Thanks.

Hi all,

This morning, there was a breach due to a flaw in our item DB server configuration. As a consequence, our active item and item history tables were erased. This is used to power the stats, item history and item search sections of the website.

We have triaged the issue and can safely say no other sections have been affected.

The good news: We can restore the active item table from recent inventory snapshot data that we keep.
The bad news: It seems highly unlikely we will be able to restore item history entries.

We do not believe the attacker had anything to do with TF2 trading, and was just scanning anything vulnerable for credentials to steal or blackmail. In this case, they just decided to delete our data.

We are currently restoring the item DB as fast as we can. Due to the sheer size of the data, this will take a while.

We have spent today auditing our entire stack to prevent issues like this happening in the future.

Previously, all trades would rollback if there was a significant number of items within them. At this moment in time, almost all trades go through regardless of item count.

Therefore, we deem that it should be safe to complete trades of any size.

However, since there is still the potential for rollbacks, be sure to verify that every offer you send has gone through. If your trade does rollback, be sure to verify that all the items you sent return to your inventory.

Due to an exploit with Steam trading, we encourage everyone to not complete any trades at this time.

This is not something that can be used to steal your items without any interaction.

To stay safe, please refrain from trading entirely. We will let you know when we believe it's safe to start trading again.