Incident Library

IL-0550 Atlassian · 2024-02-22database

Bitbucket Cloud's database slowed until connection pools saturated and requests timed out, leaving Pipelines pending

On 22 February 2024, between 07:22 and 13:30 UTC, the Bitbucket Cloud website and APIs were degraded because the vacuum process was not running often enough on the high-traffic database tables. Atlassian described the root cause as an issue during the routine autovacuuming of the active tables, which impaired the database's ability to serve requests. Connection pools saturated, response times went up and requests began timing out, which slowed many Bitbucket services and left a large backlog of unscheduled pipelines.

After the database recovered at 13:30 UTC, Bitbucket Pipelines had build scheduling delays while it processed the backlog. Atlassian added resources to Pipelines and the backlog was fully cleared by 17:30 UTC.

Severity
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Scope
Increased latency on the bitbucket.org website and APIs and significant delays running Bitbucket Pipelines; Git over HTTPS and SSH unaffected
Users affected
Bitbucket Cloud customers
Region
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Time to detect
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Time to resolve
10h 8m

Symptoms

From 07:22 UTC on 22 February 2024, the bitbucket.org website and the Bitbucket Cloud APIs became slow, and Bitbucket Pipelines runs were badly delayed. Git requests over HTTPS and SSH kept working.

As the database lost its ability to handle requests, connection pools saturated, response times grew and more and more requests timed out completely. The status page reported Pipelines not starting for some customers and builds stuck in a pending state, and reports of Pipelines queueing and delays continued after a first fix.

After the database recovered at 13:30 UTC, Pipelines still had build scheduling delays while it worked through the backlog of jobs that had queued up, until 17:30 UTC.

Symptom High latencyConnection pool exhaustionIntermittent timeoutsThroughput degradation

Root cause

Root cause Capacity exhaustion

Contributing factor No alert on limit
Trigger
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Detection

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Remediation

Action items

Lessons

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Sources

Related cases

Check your cluster for this

kubegap audits a Kubernetes cluster for conditions like the ones in this case, Database, PostgreSQL vacuum among them, read-only, from Claude Code or Codex. Its checks cite public reports like this one.

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