Honeycombio outage history

We have identified an issue where emails for SLOs, Triggers, and Anomaly Detection are not sending. We are working to fix.

Between 03:53 PM UTC to 4:08 PM UTC we saw email send failures elevate in which a small number of customers (10 enterprise, 8 self-serve, and 1 pro plan) were impacted. This came to 508 emails in total, or ~1% of our daily email send. We are working to ensure this failure mode is not able to happen again.

We are currently investigating the degradation of various services in our US region.

We've identified and isolated the impacted service and are seeing recovery in query execution. SLO processing remains degraded.

SLO processing has fully recovered. All services are now functional.

On October 20, we experienced roughly three hours of degraded service in the US region. * From 13:30 to 14:40 UTC, querying, the Honeycomb UI, the management API, and triggers experienced elevated latency and error rates, with the highest impact between 13:55 and 14:10 UTC. During this time, customers may have experienced slow or failed queries and a sluggish UI, and some trigger alerts may have been late or missed. * From 13:26 to approximately 16:10 UTC, SLO processing was delayed, so SLO data may have appeared out of date and burn alerts may have been delayed or missed during that time. * From 13:57 to 14:09 UTC, about half of requests to the event ingest API received 5xx errors, with lesser impact between 13:48 and 13:55 UTC \(1% error rate\) and for approximately a minute at 14:15 UTC \(1.9% error rate\). Telemetry rejected during these periods was not ingested unless the sender successfully retried it. Customers may see gaps in their data for those periods, including in triggers and SLOs that cover it. Our on-call engineers were first paged at 13:43 UTC by an alert about triggers not running on time, and we spun up our internal incident response as further alerts followed. Our investigation found that the primary database’s CPU was saturated by a large number of long-running read queries. We performed a database failover to relieve the load. This briefly eased the pressure, but the same queries soon reappeared on the new primary, so it did not resolve the problem. We then reduced database load by terminating those queries and temporarily pausing SLO processing, which restored the other affected services. Once a database-side timeout was in place on the responsible query, we resumed SLO processing, which then caught up, and we repaired historical SLO data. These queries came from a check our SLO processing runs whenever a Honeycomb environment's settings change. In a vast majority of cases, it completes in a few milliseconds. For the 0.1% of our environments with an unusually large number of SLOs and calculated fields, however, the database ran it in a very inefficient way, and a routine update to one such environment's settings made the check too slow to ever complete. These queries continued running after the requesting service timed out, and repeated attempts increased the load on a database shared by several services. To prevent this from happening again, in addition to the database-side timeout, we changed how the database executes the query for environments like this one, which brought its runtime down from minutes to a few milliseconds. We have also adjusted our alerting thresholds to ensure that an on-call engineer is made aware of future database load changes quickly.

From 13:57 to 14:09 UTC, event ingest in Honeycomb's US production environment was degraded by an concurrent incident . During this window, approximately 53% of incoming events received 5xx errors.

Canvas is not loading for customers in the US and EU regions and we have identified what we believe to be the cause and are rolling out a fix.

We have deployed the fix and are seeing recovery of normal Canvas functionality.

This incident has been resolved.

From 11:36UTC to 12:43UTC, queries in US1 that read older data returned errors or timed out. Queries over recent data were un-affected, and no telemetry is being lost. The issue has been identified, and a fix is in place. We are currently monitoring the situation to confirm resolution.

The fix is in place and we've confirmed resolution. Queries and SLOs are processing normally.

Between 10:30 and 11:00 AM EDT, we experienced elevated querying failures and slowness. The impact has subsided, and we are currently investigating and monitoring the situation.

Starting at 9:50 AM Central Time on July 31st we received alerts around querying health and latency. The cause was eventually tracked down to a clash of two different factors. First, we have been introducing Lambda Managed Instances \(LMI\) into our query architecture, which behave similar to classic lambdas in many ways and had been introduced as part of work around querying performance improvements with the goal of a better and faster user experience. Unfortunately, a difference between classic lambdas and LMIs we discovered is the 15 minute hard stop of classic lambdas does not exist on LMIs, which means that certain assumptions built into our querying system no longer held. At the time of the incident, our newer Canvas feature was running batches of queries for a customer which should have a self imposed one minute time out. This timeout was not properly communicated back to the lambda, and while with classic lambdas the task would automatically cut off at 15 minutes, the new LMIs were not enforcing this sort of safety mechanism. As a result, some large queries were running for up to 30 minutes, driving up query latency across the board and resulting in errors for users trying to run fresh queries. The system recovered by 10:10 AM CT, 20 minutes later, when the large queries cleared out, but we continued to investigate the cause of the incident. Once we identified this weakness in our querying architecture we began work to fix it and prevent the same incident from occurring again. We have shipped all associated incident follow ups.

We are seeing triggers intermittently failing in the EU region. We are actively investigating the cause.

We are continuing to see issues with triggers and are also noticing issues with querying. We are investigating for the cause of both.

We have identified the source of the issue, applied a temporary fix, and are working on a permanent fix. We continue to monitor the situation.

We are seeing a regression in performance with partial degradation of both triggers and querying. We are working to remediate.

The partial degradation has been resolved for all customers except for those specifically contacted. We are working on mitigation measures so that we can fully restore trigger functionality for everyone.

We are continuing to monitor for any further issues.

The degradation in querying and triggers has been resolved and we're back to full functionality.

We are currently investigating this issue.

Clearing the CDN cache appears to have solved the issue.

This incident has been resolved.

Starting at 14:24 PT, there was an issue with the Activity Log causing events to stop being processed. You may notice a gap starting at that time. We are slowly backfilling these events and do not expect any data loss to occur. We expect the full data log to be restored around 17:30 PT.

Backfill of the Activity Log events has completed. All events during the affected period should be present.

We are investigating an issue with delayed ingest in the EU region. SLOs and Trigger evaluations may also be delayed.

We are monitoring the situation. Events may have been delayed between 17:53 and 18:04 UTC.

This incident has been resolved.

We are investigating an issue with delayed ingest in the US and EU region. Our engineers are rolling back a recent deploy. SLOs and Trigger evaluations may also be delayed.

We have rolled back the deploy and ingest service has recovered. There has been an ingest outage from 17:55 - 18:14 UTC. We have also observed an delay for Service Maps.

Triggers, SLOs and Service Maps are recovered. We are continuing to monitoring the Ingest Service

All services have been fully recovered. Impact window: 17:55–18:17 UTC Regions affected: Primary impact in US. The EU region was affected to a much lesser degree. During this period, the following effects may have occurred: Ingest: Some data was not ingested, resulting in complete or partial data loss for events sent during the window. Triggers: Triggers may have failed to fire within the impact window. SLOs: SLI values across the affected window are skewed by the missing data and may show artificial dips or accelerated budget burn. Service Maps: Maps covering the outage window are incomplete. Services and dependencies may be under-counted, as their traces were not ingested. We apologize for the disruption. Please reach out if you have any questions about how this may have affected your data.

On June 24, we experienced approximately 30 minutes of severe data ingestion degradation in Honeycomb’s US and EU instances. During this degradation, Honeycomb rejected a significant percentage of inbound telemetry, and customers would have seen up to a half-hour gap in ingested telemetry. Additionally, during this same time window, customers would have experienced data processing degradation and service disruption within Anomaly Detection and Service Maps. A deployment containing a change to how services retrieve dataset schemas into local caches caused a cascading set of failures, resulting in failed remote cache retrievals, and subsequently, a MySQL stampede due to several services falling back to retrieving schemas from the database. This stampede resulted in significant memory utilization growth, causing some services to crash loop with out-of-memory exceptions while retrieving schemas. Customers would have seen 5xx errors from our ingestion APIs when this occurred, because ingestion services were among those that were crash looping. This also included crash looping from services responsible for Anomaly Detection and Service Maps. Right after these service crash loops began, alerts fired for the crashing services, and procedures were run to pin all services back to the last known good build before the breaking change landed. Once services were running the previous deploy’s build, the 5xx error responses from ingestion APIs returned to nominal baseline levels, and services that were crash looping recovered and resumed normal operation. The underlying issue centered on how dataset schema cache payloads and metadata were serialized to memcached for remote cache retrieval, and how memcached clients deserialize that data before writing it to a local cache. The code change contained a feature flag to toggle the serialization behavior, and backwards-compatibility safeguards for clients deserializing different schema versions from memcached. However, services’ schema deserialization prior to the feature flag flip on did not behave as intended, treating each backwards-compatible schema read as a hard error rather than as a fallback, which subsequently caused every remote schema cache read to fall through to the database. Subsequent analysis and review of the code identified the issue and we have re-deployed this change with a fix along with additional tests. Services now correctly and successfully deserialize schemas from memcached in a safe, backwards-compatible manner.

We are aware of an issue affecting Honeycomb MCP. Write tool functionality may be degraded. Read tools are unaffected.

We are aware of an issue affecting Honeycomb MCP. Write tool functionality may be degraded. Read tools are unaffected.

MCP Write Tools have been restored. MCP users may need to reconnect to see all available tools.

Beginning June 17th, enhance-related requests were failing to complete. We've since identified and deployed a fix, and enhance is now fully operational. Thank you for your patience.

We are continuing to investigate intermittent slowness and query failures affecting our Production EU Region. We will provide an update as soon as we have more information.

Querying in our Production EU Region is fully operational. We will continue to monitor for any abnormal behavior.

We have identified the root cause of the intermittent slowness and query failures affecting our Production EU Region. The issue was triggered by a large volume of dataset deletions that caused elevated database load, resulting in query instability. No data was lost during this incident. Service has been restored. A fix has been applied to help prevent recurrence.

We are currently investigating the cause of slowness and query failures in our Production EU Region.

The issue is now resolved and querying is back to fully functional.

Requests to Honeycomb's Query Data and Management APIs in the production-eu1 environment encountered increased error rates between approximately 15:35 and 22:24 UTC. Event ingestion was not affected. The issue has been resolved.

We are investigating an issue with delayed ingest in the EU region. Received events are still being stored, but there may be a delay in event retrieval in queries. SLOs and Trigger evaluations may also be delayed.

Queries should no longer be delayed. SLOs and Trigger evaluations remain impacted.

The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.

All services are now healthy.

We are currently investigating this issue.

This incident has been resolved.

Canvas agent cannot load honeycomb internal tools.

This incident has been resolved.

We have identified and are working to resolve an issue that is causing query results to return inconsistent results.

Impact from this issue has concluded. For a period of time (different between US and EU instances, noted below), queries spanning data older than the most recent 2 hours with certain GROUP / WHERE clauses returned inconsistent results. Data was never lost, and reruns of the same queries will show the previously missing data. US impact times: 21:50 UTC - 23:20 UTC EU impact times: 20:50 UTC - 23:20 UTC

This is an administrative update, marking the incident as Resolved. There has been no further impact since 23:20UTC on May 21 2026.