Expo: Website and services partially unavailable due to high database load
Expo reported a major degradation starting 2026-10-05 20:38 UTC, with resolution recorded earlier at 2026-10-05 20:11 UTC; duration is unknown. High primary-database CPU load left the website and API at 80-90% availability, affecting builds, submissions, CI/CD jobs and publishing updates. Serving updates to end users was unaffected.
Machine-written from the archived incident (Sol). Check the timeline before relying on it.
Timeline of updates
- resolved
Due to high database load, the Expo website and several services including submitting CI/CD jobs, build jobs, and store submissions were partially unavailable. The issue has subsided as of 1:30PM PT and we are continuing to diagnose the root cause and monitor the health of the services.
- postmortem
The primary database was under high CPU load from 1:11PM-1:29PM PT. The impact of this is that our website and API were partially unavailable \(more precisely, at 80-90% availability\) during that time. ### Scope What was affected: This affected most services including the website, builds, submissions, CI/CD jobs, and publishing updates. What wasn’t affected: Serving updates to end users maintained 100.000% availability. App performance measurements sent to Observe were also unaffected. ### Root cause analysis An internal orchestrator service used to update the state of CI/CD jobs, including build jobs and store submission jobs, was updated to retry upon application-level failures. We are investigating more thoroughly and currently believe this led to a cascade of retries that caused more failures once the database was under more load than it could handle. ### Remediation The commit that changed retry behavior was rolled back and we are clearing the queue of retries. For a more robust solution, the internal orchestrator must gracefully handle backpressure from the application server and database, and to apply more backoff.
Rewindex changes for this incident
- Major incident: Website and services partially unavailable due to high database load 2026-10-05 20:38 UTC
Impact, status and times are the vendor’s own, as last archived. View on stspg.io (opens in new tab). Expo profile · Recent Expo incidents · Markdown · JSON