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  1. IL-0257 canva.com went down for about 50 minutes when 1.5 million requests per second OOM-killed every API Gateway task
    Canva2024
    Symptoms

    On 12 November 2024, after a new version of Canva's editor was deployed at 8:47 AM UTC, the editor's object panel stayed in a perpetual loading state for many users, particularly in Asia. Then from 9:08 AM UTC to about 10:00 AM UTC canva.com was unavailable and all requests to it failed.

    Service outageOOMKilledHigh latencyPacket loss
    Trigger

    At 8:47 AM UTC a new version of the Canva editor page was deployed, and client devices began fetching its new static assets through Cloudflare while the network path between Cloudflare's Singapore and Ashburn locations was losing packets.

    Root cause
    Dependency failure
    Component
    CDN and edge networkAPI gatewayAmazon ECS
    Contributing factor
    Overlapping failuresMonitoring blind spotRetry stormAutomation amplificationUnpatched known bug
    Remediation
    • Added a temporary Cloudflare firewall rule at 9:29 AM UTC that blocked all traffic at the CDN so new API Gateway tasks could start
    • Redirected canva.com to the status page
    • Restored traffic gradually, starting with Australian users under strict rate limits
    Action items
    • Write a runbook for rerouting, blocking and progressively restoring traffic
    • Show users a more informative error page when canva.com is unavailable
    • Raise the baseline number of API Gateway tasks and the memory of each task
    • Add load shedding rules to the API Gateway for similar traffic patterns
    • Load test the API Gateway regularly
    • Deploy the patch for the thread-locking bug in the telemetry library
    • Add multithreaded tests for the contended code path to the telemetry library microbenchmark suite
    • Use page load completion events as a second canary indicator for page asset releases
    • Experiment with adding another rollout stage to the canary to give more time to detect issues
    • Add timeouts so user requests do not wait excessively long for assets
    • Work with Cloudflare to understand the system interactions behind the incident
    View case
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This case involves API gateway and CDN and edge network. kubegap audits a Kubernetes cluster for gaps like these, read-only, from Claude Code or Codex; its checks cite public reports like the ones in this library.

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By root cause1

Dependency failure1 case

Component
API gatewayCDN and edge networkAmazon ECS
Contributing factor
Automation amplificationUnpatched known bugMonitoring blind spotOverlapping failuresRetry storm
Organisation
Canva
  1. IL-0257 canva.com went down for about 50 minutes when 1.5 million requests per second OOM-killed every API Gateway task
    Canva2024