That was also the era when DBMS locking was iffy, so competing inserts/updates would happen once sites got too busy, and everyone was encouraged to turn off transactions (or, on MySQL, just use MyISAM instead of InnoDB) and put it on XFS or even tempfs for speed.

So many websites I remember came back up with "the last two weeks of posts are gone, sorry" or just shut down for good because it was all too corrupted to fix, and so were the backups, if they had any.