On Wednesday night we told you about the destruction of the leaderboards for Microsoft's all-time best-selling RTS, Halo Wars. The night that the boards disappeared, Robot Entertainment blamed the snafu on "[a]n Xbox Live technical issue". Today, in an official statement about the loss of data, Major Nelson clarified the nature of that "technical issue", but is now referring to it as "human error".

The mistake, Nelson claims, is tied to XBL servers, but as it is a person (or people) that are responsible, there is no reason to worry that it is a wider spread problem, and as of now, no other games have been affected.

Here's the full explanation from Major Nelson:

I wanted to make you aware of an unfortunate incident that has resulted in the loss of all data on the Halo Wars Xbox LIVE Leaderboards. This includes all singleplayer, multiplayer and Trueskill leaderboards, as well as all matchmaking data, resulting in the Halo Wars leaderboards being reset to original launch day status.

This was human error related to Xbox LIVE servers. It is not a broader service issue and will not impact other titles or Xbox LIVE experiences. The Xbox LIVE team is investigating the cause to prevent this from occurring in the future.

Thank you to Robot Entertainment for working with us through this issue and thank you to our Halo Wars community for your patience as we've sorted this out. On behalf of everyone at Xbox LIVE, I’d like to apologize for the incident and any frustration Halo Wars players have experienced in having their statistics disappear from the Leaderboards. You can rest assured that we’re putting processes in place to prevent this from happening in the future.

It is a little hard to believe that there are no back-up data files for XBL games. And, from this statement, it would also appear that, as early reports indicated, these leaderboard stats are gone forever, with no hope of recovery. Ouch. One has to wonder how MS plans to make up for this kind of mistake. Clearly saying that all steps are being taken to prevent this from happening again is all well and good, but what does that mean for gamers whose stats were wiped clean? I expect that, with enough outcry, gamers should be getting some free DLC out of this situation.