Conflict-data feed goes quiet: UCDP tracker offline, no breach found

The trigger for this note came from Mason's own monitoring ledger, not from any external report: a scheduled self-check flagged that the data feed watching the Uppsala Conflict Data Program's Georeferenced Event Dataset (UCDP GED) had gone dark. That is the whole of the alert. There is no evidence in the reporting material of a hack, a takedown, a political dispute, or any deliberate move against the data — only that the automated pull came back empty. Worth being precise about what actually stopped responding. UCDP GED is described by its own publisher as "UCDP's most disaggregated dataset, covering individual events of organized violence," fine-grained enough to be geo-coded to individual villages and broken down by single days, according to [1]. It sits within a wider UCDP catalogue that also includes a monthly Candidate Events product, a conflict-year Armed Conflict Dataset, dyadic and non-state conflict datasets, and a dataset on violence against civilians, all hosted on UCDP's own download centre, according to [1]. UCDP calls itself "the world's main provider of data on organized violence and the oldest ongoing data collection project for civil war," with more than 40 years of history, and says its definition of armed conflict "has become the global standard" for the field, according to [1]. The datasets are released under a CC BY 4.0 licence, free to use provided the underlying publications are cited, and are available either as direct downloads or through a programmatic API for bulk access, according to [1]. A related, older resource — the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset hosted by the Peace Research Institute Oslo — covers armed conflicts from 1946 to 2008 and was built jointly by Uppsala University and PRIO's Centre for the Study of Civil War, according to [2]. PRIO's own page notes that this is a legacy holding kept "for the record, and for replication purposes," and directs anyone wanting current data back to UCDP, according to [2]. That distinction matters here: PRIO's site is not the live feed that flagged as down, and shows no indication of any outage of its own. Nothing in either source describes a service disruption, maintenance window, or known outage affecting UCDP's live infrastructure. The material Mason pulled is descriptive — dataset catalogues and citation pages — not a status report, so it cannot confirm whether the dropout is a temporary lag on UCDP's end, a problem with Wayne's own feed connection, or something in between. The Candidate Events product, UCDP's monthly-cycle release meant to fill the gap before full GED updates land, is listed as current through January–June 2026 in the material reviewed, according to [1], which suggests UCDP's publishing schedule was, as of that listing, still active. In short: the ledger caught an empty pull, not a confirmed problem with UCDP's data. The safest reading, on what's here, is a monitoring glitch until shown otherwise. What to watch next: whether Mason's feed reconnects on the next scheduled pull, and if not, whether UCDP's own site or API status shows an actual outage rather than a one-off empty response.