Summary
Between August 3 and August 7, 2026, most approvers on Team plans didn't get the "A draft is ready for your approval" email. Drafts still appeared in the Approvals tab, and the rest of the approval flow kept working. We're sorry. If your team relies on these emails, this slowed your publishing, and we should have caught it before you did.
Customer impact
From August 3 at 11:29 UTC to August 7 at 05:07 UTC, about 85% of approval request emails didn't send. Approvers who waited for an email had no signal that a draft needed review, so some drafts sat in the Approvals queue for days. We didn't resend the missed emails. No drafts, posts, or account data were lost.
Root cause
On August 3 we started a gradual rollout of a newer system that saves posts. That system sends approval notifications to our email provider through a different route. A filter on that route only lets through events from a hand-kept list, and the approval notification wasn't on it. So the notifications were dropped silently (nothing errored anywhere). As the rollout grew, more approvals took the new route and fewer emails arrived.
Steps to resolution
1. On August 7 at 04:08 UTC, our support team connected several customer reports and opened an incident.
2. We compared how many notifications our app sent with how many emails our provider started, and traced the gap to the filter.
3. At 05:07 UTC, we added the approval notification to the filter's list, and approval emails started to send again.
4. We tested both save paths by hand and watched delivery recover before we closed the incident at 05:43 UTC.
Key learnings
- Every part of the system looked healthy while the emails went missing. Our monitoring checked that each part worked, not that the email arrived. We're adding alerts that compare the notifications we send with the emails that go out.
- You noticed before we did. The problem ran for about three days before the first report.
- A move between systems needs a check on what happens after the save. We're reviewing the other notifications on that list before they move to the new system, so they don't fail the same way.
