On January 25th, 2016, I discovered that a critical maintenance thread on the poal.me server had been deadlocked for a few weeks.

One of its roles is to check each active poll's chat and prune its oldest messages to ensure that no chat holds more than 400 messages. When this maintenance thread failed, the message pruning stopped taking place. Instead of being capped at 400, there were tens of thousands of chat messages being served in popular poll's chats. This sometimes caused the browser to freeze for a few seconds while trying to handle all of the messages.

Another role of the maintenance thread is to save the current vote totals to the disk. When the thread failed, vote totals stopped being saved to the disk. This means that when I reset the server to fix the deadlock, the vote totals for many recent polls were lost. The polls themselves are still intact, but the vote totals were reset. If you notice that a poll's vote totals are suddenly much lower than they were before January 25th, this is why.

If your poll was affected by this bug, I apologize for any trouble it may have caused you.