diff --git a/tools/donate-cpu-server.py b/tools/donate-cpu-server.py
index 6f44ea679a7..cfd5cd0e012 100755
--- a/tools/donate-cpu-server.py
+++ b/tools/donate-cpu-server.py
@@ -26,7 +26,7 @@
 # Version scheme (MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH) should orientate on "Semantic Versioning" https://semver.org/
 # Every change in this script should result in increasing the version number accordingly (exceptions may be cosmetic
 # changes)
-SERVER_VERSION = "1.3.68"
+SERVER_VERSION = "1.3.69"
 
 # TODO: fetch from GitHub tags
 OLD_VERSION = '2.20.0'
@@ -1612,7 +1612,11 @@ def server(server_address_port: int, packages: list, packageIndex: int, resultPa
     packageIndex = 0
     if os.path.isfile('package-index.txt'):
         with open('package-index.txt', 'rt') as f:
-            packageIndex = int(f.read())
+            # TODO: the file might be empty - fixture out how this might happen
+            try:
+                packageIndex = int(f.read())
+            except ValueError as e:
+                logging.error("failed to convert package index to int", e)
         if packageIndex < 0 or packageIndex >= len(packages):
             packageIndex = 0