What Really Caused the Kilter-pocalypse?
Last Wednesday, I spent an hour bouldering on the Kilter Board at my local gym in Moab, Utah. Over the past year, I’ve been working toward the hardest project of my life, and this winter, I’d started prefacing my crack trainer sessions with an hour of Kilter Board training. The V-grades I sent felt low that day, but I still logged each attempt, certain that I’d be able to at least match my volume next session. The most important thing was that I was moving forward—and by tracking my climbs, I knew I was.
I had no idea what was coming. Less than 24 hours later, every route, grade, and logged ascent in the app’s 12-year existence—including my entire winter training log—disappeared from view.
On Thursday, Kilter Board announced on Instagram that climbers should download their brand-new Kilter app. “The previous Kilter app was taken down today by the third-party company that operated it,” the company wrote. “We were not aware this would be happening today.” In an instant, tens of thousands of climbers lost access to all of their Kilter data.
Like many gym owners, Ben Rueck, who co-owns Grip Bouldering in Grand Junction, Colorado, only found out about the issue after his customers alerted him. “In general, we found people mostly upset about not having their stats and project lists, as well as the abruptness of Kilter being removed,” he told Climbing.
I still had the original Kilter app on my phone. But now, every page was blank, and my logged routes were replaced by an error message: “Data not found.” When I downloaded the new Kilter app, it said my account didn’t exist, so I created a new account with my old username. When I connected to my gym’s Kilter Board with the new app, I had no idea which boulders I had previously attempted or topped. The “0 climbs” summary on my new profile felt insultingly blank.
If I had known I’d lose my logs without warning, I’d have tracked my Kilter boulders elsewhere. Who had the right to delete a whole swath of my training like this?
The new Kilter app got 20,000 downloads in its first 24 hours; within three days, it had more than 35,000. The social media backlash on Kilter’s page was swift and emotional, full of climbers’ complaints that mirrored mine. “RIP my 3,150 ascents,” commented Sebastian Rodriguez, who became the first Uruguayan climber to send 8c/5.14b in 2019. “Worst day of my life,” commented another person. Others were more optimistic, including American boulderer Matt Fultz. “Good excuse to do some repeats,” he wrote, punctuating his comment with a shrug emoji.
But as climbers come to grips with this data loss, a competing narrative has emerged about who was responsible for removing personal training logs from tens of thousands of climbers without warning. The original Kilter app was controlled by an independent developer, Peter Michaux, who had been in and out of lawsuits with Kilter for three years. Michaux says that he was forced to take down the app’s data because of a cease and desist letter Kilter sent him on March 19. But Kilter’s co-owner, Jackie Hueftle, says that while the cease and desist letter was for Kilter’s name, logo, and board layout, it did not say Michaux needed to hide climbers’ data. So who’s telling the truth?
Climbing dug into dozens of pages of legal documents and spoke extensively with both Michaux and Hueftle to understand what happened—and how climbers can recover their training history.
The origins of the problem
In a typical software development contract, a company hires a developer to write code for them, and the company owns the code. But Kilter never signed such a contract with Peter Michaux. Instead, from the start, they relied exclusively on verbal agreements.
In 2017, Michaux, a Squamish-based climber and engineer, launched Aurora Climbing and began selling Bluetooth-controlled LED lights to various hold companies for use in their training boards. For each board, he also released a custom app. Michaux did not invent Bluetooth-controlled LEDs, which have existed since 2010, and he wasn’t the first to stick them behind climbing holds. Moon Climbing was the first to do this, with their 2016 MoonBoard.
Later in 2016, the Tension Board 1 was released as the second LED board on the market, followed by the Kilter Board in 2018, the Grasshopper Board in 2020, the Decoy Board and Tension Board 2 in 2022, and the So iLL Connect Board in 2024. To gyms and climbers, these appeared to be separate products sold by unrelated companies, but on the back end, their apps were all programmed and maintained by the same company: Aurora Climbing.
Compared to the MoonBoard and the Tension Board, the Kilter Board is much more beginner-friendly, with large, grippy holds that allow you to train power while generally reducing the likelihood of a finger injury. Perhaps that explains why the Kilter Board has exploded in popularity in the last few years. From 2021 to 2024, setters consistently voted Kilter their favorite board in Climbing Business Journal’s Grip Awards. By 2024, the Colorado-based company was generating $8 million in revenue.
Today, Kilter has sold 2,100 boards, and currently employs about 20 people globally. It’s the official training partner of World Climbing (formerly known as the International Federation of Sport Climbing) and a wall and setting partner for the Pro Climbing League. An open-source database maintained by Dutch climber Stevie-Ray Hartog lists the Kilter Board second only to MoonBoard in global popularity, likely due to the prevalence of MoonBoards in at-home training walls. Climbing Business Journal’s current commercial gym map indicates that, when looking only at gyms, Kilter is the most popular training board in the world.
A verbal agreement descends into all-out war
Even as the Kilter Board grew in profit and popularity, their relationship with Aurora grew strained due to the lack of a written contract. Eventually, their disagreements spiraled into lawsuits.
“In August 2022, Kilter started to make comments to us about their new belief that they owned some of Aurora’s intellectual property,” Michaux told Climbing. In Aurora’s view, Kilter was a customer for Aurora’s light kit and app, not a partial owner. But in Kilter’s view, they had jointly developed the app with Aurora and therefore had an ownership stake. That same year, Kilter began quietly developing a new app with different engineers.
In April 2023, seeking to clarify their business relationship, Michaux added a new terms and conditions agreement to one of Kilter’s orders of Aurora light kits. These terms stated that Aurora was the sole owner of the app and all related software, and that Kilter would not develop a separate app for its board.
Kilter refused to sign it. Instead, the company canceled the order and sued Aurora for $1 million in damages in September 2023 in Colorado. Their suit included a list of performance-related accusations: that Aurora failed to deliver app features it had promised, shared pieces of the Kilter app with Kilter competitors, and locked Kilter out of the app.
After six months of negotiations, in April 2024, the companies came to an agreement: Kilter would drop the lawsuit, Aurora would sell them 655 light kits at a fixed price, both parties would keep negotiating, and any future lawsuits would take place in British Columbia, where Aurora is based.
But one year later, each company had fresh gripes. Kilter accused Aurora of selling faulty light kits that disappointed customers. Aurora accused Kilter of reverse-engineering their controller box with another developer. After June 2024, Aurora stopped selling to Kilter, and their business relationship officially ended.
“We haven’t had clear statistics for our app for a few years because [Aurora] stopped sending it to us,” said Hueftle, who has been at the helm of Kilter since 2013. “One person was defining the experience that our customers were having all around the world.” In March 2025, Kilter modified their new app to serve as a possible replacement to Aurora’s controller box. Several months later, a customer sent Aurora a non-Aurora controller box that Michaux said looked very similar to his own design.
By July 2025, Kilter and Aurora were back in court. Kilter sued Aurora for breach of their April 2024 agreement, defamation and libel to customers, and deceptive trade practices. One month later, Aurora sued Kilter for breach of contract and passing off third-party LED kits as Aurora’s.
Finally, in March 2026, in the undertow of dueling lawsuits, Kilter made a move that ultimately led to this behind-the-scenes dispute becoming very, very public.
The cease and desist heard ‘round the world
On March 19, Kilter sent Aurora a three-page letter demanding that Aurora “immediately cease and desist all use of Kilter’s valuable trademark and copyrights,” including Kilter’s name, logo, and images of its board layout. If Aurora did not agree to do this within five business days, the letter warned, Kilter would add trademark and copyright infringement claims to its existing lawsuit.
“It wasn’t really a decision on my part,” Michaux told Climbing. “The trademarks they were telling us to stop using… were inextricable from the [Kilter] app. They were in the identifier; they’re in the name of the app on the App Store; they’re on all of the apps to communicate with our service, which had ‘Kilter’ in it, and we can’t change those apps to communicate with a different server.” (By “identifier,” he meant the Bundle ID in the Apple App Store and package name in Google Play.) “All the ways that you would discover the [Kilter] app and that the app would communicate data is bound to the trademark that they were demanding we stop using,” he emphasized.
Hueftle saw it differently. “The letter did not say that he needed to hide everybody’s data or shut down the data,” she told Climbing. While that may be technically true, the letter did require Aurora to stop using Kilter’s trademarked name, which was in the immutable identifier and the server name (api.kilterboardapp.com). Without a server, the app can’t load data; without Kilter’s trademarked board design, the problems can’t be displayed.
On March 24, Michaux texted Hueftle directly. “It appears that Kilter is demanding that Aurora stop offering the Aurora App for use with Kilter Boards for download and stop supporting it,” he wrote, according to text messages viewed by Climbing. “If that is not Kilter’s intention, please advise.”
Hueftle did not respond. The next day, Kilter’s attorney called Aurora’s attorney and left a two-minute voicemail, the first 30 seconds of which Michaux shared with Climbing (He claimed the rest of the message was unrelated to taking down the app). The voicemail from Kilter’s attorney stated:
“Jackie [Hueftle] advised that Peter [Michaux] reached out directly to her to ask about the cease and desist. I recognize that the cease and desist is officially saying that Aurora is no longer going to operate the app. We are asking that Aurora strictly comply with the language in the cease and desist, but that also includes the preservation of all data that must be preserved.”
To Michaux, the strict compliance request confirmed that he was obligated to remove the app right away to avoid trademark infringement.
Finally, on the morning of March 26, seven days after receiving the cease and desist letter, Michaux stripped user data from the Kilter app and took it down from the App Store and Google Play. Within hours, Kilter had released their new app and announced it as a replacement. That’s when climbers across the world realized their entire history of Kilter Board sessions was missing.
How can climbers regain their data—and keep training on the Kilter board?
In our separate interviews, both Michaux and Hueftle sound exhausted by this week’s backlash from climbers. Neither seems happy about what happened or how.
In the past few days, Michaux has responded to hundreds of individual emails from climbers demanding or requesting their data. He’s been providing a JSON file—a text document of field-value pairs, arranged by curly brackets—to any climber who emails support@auroraclimbing.com, so long as they reach out with the email that corresponds to their old username. Yesterday, I emailed Aurora from my personal email and got a response in two hours. My JSON file contained a relatively neat list of timestamped ascents and attempts, but I couldn’t sort them by date without writing my own code. At the moment, Kilter’s new app does not offer a way for climbers to upload and visualize their old logs, but a few open-sourced sites do, such as Sandbox Bouldering for the 12×12 Kilter Board and Boardsesh for all sizes.
By contrast, the Kilter team has been swarmed with bugs in their new app, which they said they had wanted more time to polish it before launching. (In my session on Saturday, I was unable to log any attempts.) With a team spread across Europe, Australia, and the U.S., Kilter has been troubleshooting user issues nearly 24 hours each day.
“I’ve just been in front of my computer for three days,” said Hueftle. “We know this is a huge frustration and inconvenience for folks, and we appreciate everyone’s patience through this transition.” She asks that all bugs be reported to app.kiltergrips.com/feedback so they can be directed to one of Kilter’s developers. New app users can also claim the boulders they set on the old app at kilterboard.io/claim.
Even though Kilter’s full product is now totally divorced from Aurora’s software, the companies aren’t out of legal jeopardy yet. On March 30, a Colorado judge dismissed Kilter’s lawsuit, but Aurora’s lawsuit against Kilter is still set to continue and could very well lead to significant financial penalties. In the meantime, Aurora remains in control of the Tension, Decoy, Grasshopper, So iLL, Touchstone, and Aurora Board apps.
Despite the bumpy rollout of the new app and a looming lawsuit, the Kilter team finally has what they’ve wanted for a long time: a product they 100% control, just like Moon Climbing. “We’ve basically been stuck for a few years,” says Hueftle. “We’re going to be here for our community. They just have to stick with us as we get through it.”
If Kilter can placate disappointed climbers, clean up their app, and survive its legal battles, they’re likely to continue to hold their user base in the world of board climbing. The new Kilter app already has a few features that the old one didn’t: verified climbs (similar to Moon’s Benchmarks), a five-star rating system (as opposed to the three-star one), a temporary grade range for new problems, and a toggle to switch between V-grades and Font grades. It’s messy, but there’s certainly promise.
Ultimately, I’m lucky: Board climbing is supplemental training for me, not my main goal. For the time being, I’ll be sticking with Kilter because that’s the only board my Moab gym has. Until I leave town next month, I’ll use any app that works with it—even if I have to ignore the occasional déjà vu.
The post What Really Caused the Kilter-pocalypse? appeared first on Climbing.