Cases2 cases

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1. IL-0561 DigitalOcean's Cloud Control Panel and Public API returned up to 25% errors in two windows as authorization timed out

   DigitalOcean2026

   Symptoms

   From 16:56 UTC on 24 August 2026, requests to DigitalOcean's Cloud Control Panel, Public API and the product management systems that depend on them failed at elevated rates. Automated monitoring flagged abnormal error rates and latency at 16:58. Running Droplets, network routing and block storage Volumes kept working.

   High error rateHigh latency

   Trigger

   A planned migration of the database layer behind DigitalOcean's identity, authentication and authorization services made one critical authorization query run much slower than its historical baseline.

   Root cause

   Configuration change

   Component

   DatabaseIdentity and access service

   Contributing factor

   Retry stormHarmful manual action

   Detection

   Automated monitoring detected abnormal error rates and latency at 16:58 UTC, two minutes after the authorization query slowed down.

   Remediation

   • Rerouted authorization traffic onto a single healthy processing path
   • Temporarily disabled hedged retries for the primary callers
   • Disabled the retry and amplification behaviour across the remaining affected services
   • Added read capacity for the slow authorization query

   Action items

   • Deploy circuit breakers in upstream services that detect a degraded downstream dependency and suppress hedged requests and retries
   • Audit the architecture so retry suppression and circuit breaking are enforced the same way in every control plane service
   • Add fast-fail load shedding so request queues do not saturate while a dependency is slow
   • Add telemetry alerts that spot queues backing up before customers are affected
   • Let critical authorization components run in a degraded mode on asynchronous, eventually consistent database replicas when the primary database is slow

   View case
2. IL-0342 DigitalOcean's AMS3, LON1 and SFO2 data centers lost Internet connectivity in repeated waves as edge routers failed

   DigitalOcean2023

   Symptoms

   From 09:55 UTC on 9 August 2023, DigitalOcean's AMS3, LON1 and SFO2 datacenters lost Internet access in waves of 10 to 15 minutes, about an hour apart. Users saw connectivity issues, latency and timeout errors on Droplets and on Droplet-based services such as Load Balancers, Kubernetes and Database clusters.

   Network unreachableIntermittent timeoutsHigh latency

   Trigger

   The edge routers received an RPKI-related routing update, and the operating system software on them crashed its routing process on that update.

   Root cause

   Software defect

   Component

   BGP routing

   Contributing factor

   Excessive blast radiusHarmful manual action

   Remediation

   • Rolled out a software update to the edge routers running the affected version, site by site
   • Rebalanced traffic on the congested routes between AMS3 and FRA1
   • Rolled out the fix to the redundant networking equipment so a failover would not hit the bug

   Action items

   • Upgrade all global edge routers to remove the bug
   • Bring the network upgrades already done in Asia to Europe and North America

   View case

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