Frontier Developments has made an official announcement about the reported server issues in Elite: Dangerous, the space combat and trade simulator (thanks Gex). These unfortunately surfaced during the holidays, which made dealing with things a little more difficult, though in a previous post they explained that they do have 24/7 engineer coverage, as many took this to suggest they do not. That post tells those impacted by failed transactions "should have received their refunds, along with a 20% bonus as in previous instances." The newer post adds more details, including word that those who became instant billionaires as a result of glitches will not be banned, but they may yet have their windfalls reversed. Others who actively exploited the problems may receive further punishment, however, as they explain:

After shoring up the database, in the early hours of the 2nd of January, we automatically refunded all the affected players for their lost transactions and also granted them a 20% bonus for their troubles. However, during this refund process, a very few (lucky) commanders received more credits than perhaps they were entitled to (5 billion credits in some cases)!

To be clear - these players will not be banned. Over the next 24 hours we will be investigating every affected player and performing individual commander rollbacks where we feel it's fair to - which may include credits, assets and rank where appropriate. We may reach out to individual commanders where this situation may not be straight forward. None of these players will be eligible for the "Race to Elite" competition if we feel they have gained an unfair advantage over the competition.

On the morning of the 3rd of January, after reports that some players were still having issues, we ran a second pass over the database to remove any excess cargo commanders may have still been carrying, which should have unblocked the commodities markets for those remaining affected players. In the next 24 hours we shall also be issuing a server side fix to automatically issue a credit or asset refund on login after cases similar to these. Of course, if you are still having problems, please submit a support ticket at https://support.elitedangerous.com - our customer services team can help.

We are also aware of an exploit (I wont detail it here) which occurred due to this database error, where players have been abusing the broken state of their ship to "create credits". These players know they are exploiting the system and will also be investigated. Actions may be taken against players who are known to be exploiting the system and do stand out from the commanders who were simply given the credits during our credit refund process. These players will also not be eligible for the "Race to Elite" competition if we feel they have gained an unfair advantage over the competition.

Again, I (and the whole of the online team) apologise for the disruption you may have suffered over the last few days. As you can see, we reacted promptly to the situation but simply failed to communicate this in good time with the players.

To avoid this happening in the future, in the next week, we shall be publishing a "Server Status" dashboard which you can use to see the state of the online galaxy. From here we shall let you know immediately of any problems we are currently facing, any known issues and any scheduled down-time for maintenance. This should give us a single place for us to be able to communicate directly with you guys about any problems the servers are currently facing - or hopefully - simply that all is well in the galaxy.