The Case of an Overloaded Database and What Happens When a Bug Bites (Week of Oct. 4-11) | Outage Deep Dive

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. In this week’s episode, we dive into a recent outage at Slack that caused intermittent issues for its enterprise users (including ourselves) for nearly a full day. The cause, as noted by Slack, was on the backend and related to an overloaded database. Next, we dig into another outage at Microsoft. According to their statement, a bug in an internal update seems to have revoked the routes to a number of devices that were believed to be unhealthy—thereby creating congestion in the rest of their network. This explanation jives with the increased packet loss we observed during this time period. Don’t miss this week’s episode, where we walk through these outages in depth