Date: March 30, 2026 Duration: ~4 hours (approx. 04:00–08:00 UTC) Severity: Minor Status: Resolved
Pinterest's API began returning internal server errors ("Something went wrong on our end"), causing failures for both image and video publishing through Buffer. No issues were identified on Buffer's systems — the root cause was entirely on Pinterest's side.
Approximately 590 scheduled and manual posts to Pinterest were affected over the ~4-hour window. Image posts experienced intermittent failures, while video posts failed consistently during the incident. No customer-reported issues were received during this period.
Elevated Pinterest publishing error rates were detected via our monitoring systems.
Our team investigated and confirmed that all errors originated from Pinterest's API, not from Buffer's infrastructure.
We continued to monitor Pinterest's API health while the issue persisted.
Pinterest resolved the issue on their end, and our publishing success rates returned to normal (~98%).
We verified that retrying previously failed posts succeeded, confirming full recovery.
Reduce customer pain during third-party outages. We're exploring circuit breaker and graceful degradation patterns around partner API calls so that when an outage like this occurs, customers see a clear message (e.g., "Pinterest is experiencing issues — we'll retry automatically") rather than a generic error. We're also looking at improving our automatic retry mechanisms so posts recover without requiring manual action.
Detect partner degradation earlier. Pinterest's own status page did not reflect this outage. We plan to add more sensitive, platform-specific alert thresholds and incorporate external signals to catch these issues sooner.
What went well. Our team quickly triaged the issue and correctly identified Pinterest as the root cause by cross-referencing multiple data sources. The fact that no customer reports came in is encouraging, though it also prompted us to consider whether better in-app messaging could help customers understand when a partner platform is experiencing problems.
