It would seem that catastrophe has hit the DotA-esque world of Heroes of Newerth. "During our scheduled maintenance period this morning we had a catastrophic hardware failure across a number of systems including some of our backup systems," a post on the game's official site has revealed.

On the Heroes of Newerth forum, an S2 Games employee revealed that the failure occurred during scheduled maintenance to upgrade the processors on the database boxes. "Both of our servers were simultaneously taken offline while the new hardware was being put in place. During this period of time, the file systems on BOTH [emphasis by the employee] boxes were destroyed."

The post adds that it "seems almost statistically impossible" for a simultaneous failure to occur; however, it is in fact what happened. "If this boggles your mind to the point that you can't believe it could happen, you would be in the same exact boat we are!" the forum post notes.

According to the employee, developer S2 Games is left with no hardware to operate its databases and replacements are not readily available. "We are scrambling to bring our systems back online temporarily so you can play the game through other short term methods while we get new hardware online."

S2 Games has not offered an estimated time for the game's revival. Shacknews has contacted representatives for S2 Games to learn more details and to get an ETA, but has yet to hear back at the time of publishing.

[Thanks, Ecks]