The database of the Air Force's Automated Case Tracking System (ACTS)—which is used by the Air Force Inspector General's Office to manage investigations into complaints from whistleblowers of waste, fraud, and abuse; Freedom Of Information Act requests; and congressional inquiries—has become corrupted, rendering over 100,000 case files dating back to 2004 unreadable. And because of the way the database was backed up, an Air Force spokesperson said that neither the service nor Lockheed Martin—the contractor that operates the ATCS system for the Air Force—can recover the data.

"The database crashed and there is no data," Ann Stefanak of Air Force Media Operations said in a statement to press. "We’ve kind of exhausted everything we can to recover [the data internally]... and now we’re going to outside experts to see if they can help." Efforts are being made to see if the data was backed up in other locations, and the Air Force has begun asking for help from other organizations within the Department of Defense and from outside experts in recovering the database's contents.

Air Force officials were informed by Lockheed Martin employees of the database crash on June 6 after the company spent two weeks attempting to recover the data. While much of the data in the system was historical, ACTS is primarily used to track ongoing investigations and inquiries—and those cases are now "experiencing significant delays,” Stefanek said.