# Expo: Website and services partially unavailable due to high database load

- Impact (vendor’s label): major
- Status: postmortem
- Started: 2026-10-05 20:38 UTC · Resolved: 2026-10-05 20:11 UTC · Duration: -27 min
- Updates: 2
- [Vendor status page: https://stspg.io/y0fcz8ysvmnh](https://stspg.io/y0fcz8ysvmnh)
- [Company: Expo](https://rewindex.com/company/expo.md)

## Summary

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, sol)_
## Timeline of updates

- **resolved** 2026-10-05 20:11 UTC: 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** 2026-10-05 20:40 UTC: 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

- 2026-10-05 20:38 UTC: [Major incident: Website and services partially unavailable due to high database load](https://rewindex.com/change/ib631611537ca5f.md)


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Canonical: https://rewindex.com/company/expo/incidents/8mnxqntmv8zd · Markdown: https://rewindex.com/company/expo/incidents/8mnxqntmv8zd.md · JSON: https://rewindex.com/api/v1/companies/expo/incidents/8mnxqntmv8zd · Generated 2026-10-18T09:58:50.290Z