# Lightstep Webapp Down

- Provider: [ServiceNow Cloud Observability](https://down.guide/lightstep)
- Level: confirmed
- Impact: Major outage
- lasted 3h 24m
- started 2022-01-20 17:58 UTC
- US - Service Directory, US - Dashboards, US - Change Intelligence +1
- us
- id: DWN-c972089f00
- Official page: https://stspg.io/0ywk8cvcqg82

## Updates from ServiceNow Cloud Observability
### 2022-01-20 17:58 UTC: investigating
We are currently investigating this issue.

### 2022-01-20 18:41 UTC: investigating
All pages are operational except for the streams page. We are continuing to investigate.

### 2022-01-20 20:08 UTC: monitoring
A fix for the remaining unavailability on the streams page is rolling out, and is expected to complete by 1pm PST.

### 2022-01-20 21:21 UTC: monitoring
We are continuing to monitor for any further issues.

### 2022-01-20 21:21 UTC: resolved
This incident has been resolved.

### 2022-02-01 23:14 UTC: postmortem
## \*\*Summary\*\*
Web UI inaccessible for 48 minutes \\(9:49am - 10:37am\\), and streams page inaccessible for an additional 48 minutes \\(until 11:25am\\).
## \*\*Timeline \\(12-hour Pacific Time\\)\*\*
09:49 AM PT: 100% of API requests for the webapp begin failing
09:52 AM PT: Database hits 100% resource utilization
10:31 AM PT: Divert all traffic from webapp to bring up database
10:37 AM PT: Allow all traffic except from the operation/get endpoint so the webapp is back up
11:25 AM PT: Allow operation/get traffic and incident is resolved
## \*\*Root Cause\*\*
Database errors led to transient unavailability.  Aggressive retries saturated the database, leading to a negative feedback loop.
## \*\*Action items\*\*
We have updated our database configuration to limit the blast radius of failing or slow database calls.  We have also implemented additional rate limiting to avoid the negative feedback loop where many concurrent requests lead to failures, leading to more requests.

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