On September 22, some customers in our Beta program couldn't create or schedule Pinterest posts. The composer showed their chosen board as selected, but when they tried to save, the post was rejected with a message saying a board was required. We're sorry for the frustration this caused.
Root cause
We're upgrading the technology behind the composer and rolling the change out gradually, starting with our Beta program. The upgrade caused Pinterest posts to lose the selected board when they were saved. Our pre-release tests covered the most common ways of creating a post, but not this Pinterest flow.
Customer impact
Between 08:26 and 10:59 UTC, four attempts to create a Pinterest post failed across three accounts, one of them belonging to a Buffer team member. Only Pinterest posts made in the web composer by customers in our Beta program were affected. Other channels, and customers outside the Beta program, weren't affected.
Steps to resolution
Once the issue was reported, we reproduced it and traced it to the upgrade. We switched the upgrade off for the Beta program, which moved the composer back to its previous setup, and confirmed Pinterest posts saved correctly again. No release was needed, so the fix took effect right away.
Key learnings and what we're changing
Fixing the underlying gap: the upgraded composer now keeps the selected Pinterest board when a post is saved.
Testing more networks and more scenarios: we're expanding our automated tests to cover creating and editing posts on every network we support, including the settings specific to each network.
