Root Cause Analysis

An incorrectly formatted environment variable in our production environment caused application errors and degraded service availability. This misconfiguration led to runtime exceptions in components dependent on the affected variable, impacting request handling and background job execution.

The issue was traced back to a recent deployment, during which the malformed variable was introduced. We are implementing additional safeguards in our deployment pipeline to validate environment configurations before rollout and prevent similar incidents in the future.

Timeline

11:14 UTC - A new environment variable was rolled out. 

11:14 UTC - A synthetic monitoring alert was received.

11:14 UTC - Rollback started

11:18 UTC - Rollback completed

Impact

Be My AI (chat): Fully unavailable during the incident.

Calls to volunteers and service directory profiles: Fully unavailable during the incident.

Other Services: Disruptions during the incident.

Resolution

All services were restored by 11:18 UTC, with system stability confirmed through checks. No user data was in danger due to the incident.