Duration: 12 minutes

Affected Components: TheTalkShow

Jul 13, 22:02:41 GMT+0
Postmortem - # Incident Postmortem: US Region 3 Performance Degradation **Incident Date:** July 13th 2026 **Severity:** SEV-2 (Regional degradation, mitigated via failover — no full outage) **Status:** Resolved via temporary failover; permanent fix pending upstream carrier repair (ETA 24h) **Author:** \[Your Name / Team\] --- ## Summary At approximately 04:20 CST, automated monitoring detected degraded performance on US Region 3 infrastructure. Root cause was traced to an upstream fiber cable break at our backend hosting provider's facility, which forced their systems onto a secondary circuit and introduced significant latency. Our team isolated Region 3 traffic, failed over remaining regions to a backup server, and coordinated with the hosting provider to move to a temporary secondary facility while the fiber break is repaired. --- ## Timeline (all times CST) | Time | Event | | -------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | **04:20** | Automated uptime/monitoring bot fires initial alert for degraded performance on US Region 3 servers. | | **04:20 – 04:25** | On-call team begins monitoring the alert to confirm whether it's transient noise or a sustained issue. | | **04:25** | Monitoring confirms sustained, significant degradation — latency spikes to \~1500ms (baseline is presumably sub-100ms; confirm your normal baseline for the report). Incident formally declared. | | **04:25 – 04:32** _(est.)_ | Team isolates Region 3 from active traffic routing to prevent degraded connections from affecting dependent services. | | **04:32 – 04:40** _(est.)_ | Remaining healthy regions failed over/re-pointed to backup server infrastructure as a precaution / load redistribution. | | **04:40 – 04:50** _(est.)_ | Team engages primary hosting provider to report the anomaly and request root cause. | | **04:50 – 05:05** _(est.)_ | Hosting provider identifies the issue as backend API latency, traces it to their own backend hosting dependency. | | **05:05 – 05:20** _(est.)_ | Team escalates directly to the backend hosting provider. Provider confirms a **fiber cable break** upstream, currently running on a **secondary (backup) circuit**, which is the source of the added latency. | | **05:20** _(est.)_ | Team requests temporary migration to a secondary facility to restore normal performance while the fiber repair is completed. | | **05:20 – Present** | Operating on secondary facility / backup routing. Region 3 remains isolated from primary path pending fiber repair. | | **T+24h (est.)** | Fiber repair expected to complete; provider will cut back from secondary circuit to primary, and we will fail Region 3 back from backup infrastructure to normal production routing. | > **Note:** Timestamps marked _(est.)_ are inferred from your sequence of events. Recommend pulling exact timestamps from your monitoring system (Datadog/PagerDuty/etc.) and hosting provider's incident ticket to replace these before this doc is finalized/shared externally. --- ## Root Cause A **physical fiber cable break** occurred at (or upstream of) our backend hosting provider's facility. This forced their infrastructure onto a secondary/backup fiber circuit, which introduced substantial additional round-trip latency. This latency propagated through their backend API layer, which our Region 3 servers depend on, resulting in end-to-end ping/latency of approximately **1500ms** for affected traffic — well outside acceptable thresholds. This was **not** a compute, application, or configuration failure on our side — it was a Tier 2 (hosting provider) → Tier 3 (backend hosting/carrier) dependency failure that cascaded upward. --- ## Impact * **Affected:** US Region 3 traffic experienced degraded performance (\~1500ms latency) for approximately **\[X minutes/hours — fill in from alert-to-isolation time, \~12 min based on the timeline above\]** before isolation. * **Not affected:** Other regions remained stable and were proactively failed over to backup infrastructure as a precautionary measure, not due to direct impact. * **User-facing impact:** \[Fill in — e.g., "Elevated latency on API calls routed through Region 3; no reported downtime or data loss."\] --- ## Resolution / Current Mitigation 1. Region 3 isolated from primary routing. 2. Remaining regions failed over to backup server infrastructure. 3. Backend hosting provider temporarily relocating operations to a secondary facility. 4. Full resolution (fiber repair + cutback to primary circuit/facility) expected within **24 hours**..

Jul 13, 21:39:02 GMT+0
Monitoring - We have reached out to our Hosting Provider and implemented a temporary fix. Service should be restored shortly. We are monitoring this situation to ensure resolvement..

Jul 13, 21:27:57 GMT+0
Investigating - We are currently investigating this incident..

Jul 13, 21:31:20 GMT+0
Identified - Our team has discovered the root cause of the slower loading speed. We have reached out to our hosting provider for more information..

Jul 13, 21:39:48 GMT+0
Resolved - This incident has been resolved..