 On May 12, 2009, AVSIM was attacked by a hacker, resulting in a catastrophic loss of data of the website.Tom Allensworth, CEO and Publisher of AVSIM, explained that the site used two servers to back-up the site's data, but that the hacker deleted the content of both, destroying the ability to use one server to restore the data of the other.The site had not established an external backup system.