Missing commits from branch

[Karan Jadaun]

Hey Support team, 

I hope this message finds you well. I found out that some commits of a user that he merged in the past few days are missing from the upstream master branch but we are not sure what have caused this situation. We tried git log and we don't see any commits pushed between that phase. Can you let me know what are the possible root causes for it? Also, I see someone forced pushed to that branch. Can that be the root cause of this issue? 

[Charlie Misonne]

Hi @Karan Jadaun 

 I see someone forced pushed to that branch.

This can definitely be the root cause.

When someone pushes without properly dealing with changes on the remote first, they would get a merge conflict. Using a force push will override this safety check.

When force pushing you can alter history meaning commits can get lost if they did not exist on the local branch of the user who force pushes.
Ideally you disable force pushes on the master branch.

Perhaps the missing commits are still on the user's local environment and can still be retrieved that way?