# Asana: Critical incident: Asana webapp unavailable

**Summary:** Asana reported a critical webapp outage across Australia, EU, Japan, Middle East and US, starting at 2026-01-22 17:48 UTC and resolved at 2026-01-22 19:00 UTC (1 h 12 min). The postmortem said the App and associated services were unavailable from 17:33 - 17:57 UTC after a code path overloaded a shared metadata database, causing queuing, timeouts and errors. _(machine-written, sol)_
- Kind: Major incident · Label: outage (model (Jev))
- Changed: 2026-01-22 17:48 UTC · Detected: 2026-10-17 18:22 UTC
- [Source: https://stspg.io/smb886pw9vk1](https://stspg.io/smb886pw9vk1)
- [Company: Asana](https://rewindex.com/company/asana.md)
- Versions: before (none: first archived) → after incident\_version:90/3z9g0xv4lvdv@dac30ed5303f
- Change 1 of 1 for this incident

## What changed

**1. Added: Title**

```diff
+ Asana webapp unavailable
```

**2. Added: Impact**

```diff
+ critical
```

**3. Added: Status**

```diff
+ postmortem
```

**4. Added: Start time**

```diff
+ 2026-01-22 17:48 UTC
```

**5. Added: Resolved time**

```diff
+ 2026-01-22 19:00 UTC
```

**6. Added: Affected components**

```diff
+ App, Australia - App, EU - App, Japan - App, Middle East - App, US - App
```

**7. Added: Update** (investigating) · 2026-01-22 17:48 UTC

```diff
+ We're investigating an outage, it looks like no one is able to reach the Asana webapp.
```

**8. Added: Update** (investigating) · 2026-01-22 17:51 UTC

```diff
+ We are continuing to investigate this issue.
```

**9. Added: Update** (investigating) · 2026-01-22 17:59 UTC

```diff
+ We've identified the cause and have rolled back. Based on our monitoring, we should be recovered for some users.
```

**10. Added: Update** (investigating) · 2026-01-22 18:04 UTC

```diff
+ Error rates have dropped significantly, to about 2%. It's possible some users continue to see errors, but we expect most users to be able to use Asana.
```

**11. Added: Update** (investigating) · 2026-01-22 18:38 UTC

```diff
+ Our error rates are back to normal baseline, and we don't expect an immediate recurrence. We'll create a post-mortem in the next few days with more details, including what happened and how we plan to prevent this going forward.
```

**12. Added: Update** (resolved) · 2026-01-22 19:00 UTC

```diff
+ This incident has been resolved.
```

**13. Added: Update** (postmortem) · 2026-01-27 07:53 UTC

```diff
+ Incident: On 2026-01-22 the Asana App and all associated services had a service disruption due to dependency on a shared database used for storing metadata. This was triggered by a code path which caused overload for that database, followed by request queuing, timeouts, and errors. Impact: From 17:33 - 17:57 UTC the Asana App and all associated services were unavailable. There was a further 14 minutes of partial downtime from 18:45 - 18:59 UTC affecting 10-20% of users, also triggered by dependency on this shared database. Moving forward: We immediately rolled back our application code and added resources for this database. Going forward we will continue to reduce dependency on this shared database for common paths to reduce risk, and monitor for unexpected resource usage. Our metric considers a weighted average of uptime experienced by users at each data center. The number of minutes of downtime shown reflects this weighted average.
```

## History of this incident

| When (UTC) | Change | Label |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 2026-01-22 17:48 UTC | Critical incident: Asana webapp unavailable (this change) | outage |

All Asana changes: [timeline](https://rewindex.com/company/asana/changes.md)
_Diff excerpts are shown on normalized text: dates, counters and tokens appear as ‹date›, ‹count›, ‹tok›; noise-only edits are hidden. Rewindex shows the changed passages, not a copy of the page._


---
Canonical: https://rewindex.com/change/ia3e062521e7712 · Markdown: https://rewindex.com/change/ia3e062521e7712.md · JSON: https://rewindex.com/api/v1/changes/ia3e062521e7712 · Generated 2026-10-18T00:39:27.896Z