On 28 August 2026, customers experienced severe disruption to Buffer’s Publishing dashboard for approximately two and a half hours. The dashboard and channel list were slow or failed to load, preventing affected customers from opening the composer and managing content. Creating or approving posts also failed for affected customers.

Our follow-up investigation identified a routing problem during the rollout of our new login system. Publishing requests were sent to a smaller group of backend servers instead of the group intended to handle that traffic. This overloaded those servers and caused slow responses and timeouts. Expensive database queries caused by a missing index added to the load.

We restored service on Friday through a combination of increased server capacity, disabling the feature that triggered the expensive queries, and reducing processing overhead. On Monday 31 August, we corrected the routing so Publishing requests reached the intended servers.

Our follow-up work focuses on catching routing mismatches earlier, improving alerting, and including feature-flag changes alongside deployments in incident investigations.

We’re sorry for the disruption to your work. Thank you for your patience.