Xbox mouthpiece Major Nelson updated his blog with news of an unfortunate (and for some people possibly tragic) incident that has resulted in the loss of all leaderboard data for Halo Wars on Xbox LIVE.

The data loss includes statistics racked up in singleplayer, multiplayer, Trueskill leaderboards and matchmaking data, essentially setting everything back to zero as on the day of the game’s launch. Nelson writes:

“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.”

Nelson then goes on to thank Robot Entertainment, the developer now tasked with keeping Halo Wars running after the closure of Ensemble, the original developers, after which he offered an apology to everyone affected by the data wipe:

“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.”

Unfortunate.