This unplanned maintenance window lasted from the 15th through August 19th.
Summary
Leading up to August 15th, our engineering team began tracking multiple architectural limitations which led us to make the difficult decision to proactively take the site offline to protect you, our customer, until the issue could be fully resolved.
Root Cause
We identified several contributing technology factors, specifically:
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Third Party Integrations: Our integration with external providers did not contain the right safeguards to catch and contain failures.
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Call retry logic: The retry mechanism amplified errors instead of safely stopping them.
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System observability: Logging and monitoring were missing in certain key areas, which limited early detection.
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Alerting approach: Dashboards and alerts were reactive, triggering after issues occurred rather than preventing them.
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Scaling constraints: Certain technical design choices created bottlenecks under higher loads.
These combined factors led to errors propagating through the system rather than being isolated.
Resolution
Our engineering team identified the root causes, stabilized integrations, and implemented fixes that allowed us to safely bring the system back online.
What We’ve Fixed
We immediately put in place several improvements to strengthen system reliability:
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Resilient Architecture: Introduced smarter retry logic, circuit breakers, and stronger safeguards against API disruptions.
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Improved Observability: Enhanced logging in critical paths, deployed real-time dashboards, and implemented proactive alerting to detect issues earlier.
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Stronger Testing: Expanded production-like test environments and automated error detection to catch potential failures before they impact customers.
Our Commitment: Reliability is our top priority. These changes are designed to strengthen resilience, improve visibility, and ensure our customers experience uninterrupted, high-quality service.