Investigating reports of intermittently increased API latency impacting Egress, Ingress, and SIP

What to do

• Check whether you use LiveKit Cloud Global Egress, Global Ingress, Global SIP. Check your stack

  Paste a package.json, lockfile, Terraform or a list of domains at down.guide/stack to see every provider you depend on.

• Confirm your retries, queues and scheduled jobs caught up after the 1h 12m it lasted.

  Anything that failed between 2026-09-15 17:04 UTC and 2026-09-15 18:16 UTC may need a replay.

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Updates from LiveKit Cloud 5

1. investigatingSep 15, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

   We are investigating reports of intermittently increased API latencies starting at 13:30 UTC. Users may observe increased latency spikes across all APIs.

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2. monitoringSep 15, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

   We are still investigating, but believe that customer impact should be mostly mitigated - although some spikes may still be occurring. We are investigating reports of aborted egresses which we believe were also related to this issue. We will post another update as soon as possible.

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3. monitoringSep 15, 2026, 6:03 PM UTC

   We are continuing to monitor, but want to keep users up to date with how we believe impact may have materialized. The first impact window started at 13:40 UTC and impacted Ingress and Egress services for about 3 minutes. The second impact window started at 16:11 UTC and impacted SIP, Ingress, and Egress services for about 1 minute.

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4. resolvedSep 15, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

   We are resolving this incident as the underlying issue has been resolved. Thank you for your patience and apologies for the disruption. We will follow up with a postmortem as soon as possible.

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5. postmortemSep 17, 2026, 2:26 PM UTC

   ### Summary On 15 September, LiveKit Cloud experienced three periods of degraded performance between 13:34–13:41, 16:06–16:11 and 21:10–21:22 UTC. Ingress creation was the most affected: more than half of `CreateIngress` requests failed at the worst point. A number of in-progress recordings ended prematurely, and a small percentage of inbound SIP calls failed during a one-minute period \(during each impact window\). Realtime connections were not affected and media already flowing continued normally. The cause was a dropped connection to our primary metadata database that neither the client nor server side detected, which left a transaction open and holding row locks for up to 17 minutes. Requests queued behind those locks, and the sudden release of that backlog — not the wait itself — is what briefly degraded the wider platform. ### Root Cause Our services share a distributed global metadata database that stores ingress and egress state. At the time of the incident, a connection between one of our services and that database was dropped in a way neither end observed: the client treated the connection as closed and returned an error, while the database continued to consider the session live. Because the client had a transaction open at the time, the database kept that transaction's row locks held. The impact then came in two distinct phases. **While the lock was held**, only requests that needed the same rows were affected. Ingress creation failed, and recordings that could not report their status ended early. Most other APIs were unaffected, because they never touched the locked rows. **When the lock was released**, several hundred transactions that had queued behind it — some waiting more than seventeen minutes — all executed within a fraction of a second. That burst briefly saturated the database and degraded it for every service using it, not just those touching the original rows. This is why the broadest impact, including room management APIs and SIP participant creation, appears at the very end of each window rather than during it. The database only reclaimed the abandoned session when the operating system's TCP timeout expired, roughly 17 minutes after the connection was dropped. Two design choices amplified a single stuck row into regional impact: * **Recording workers treated "cannot report status" as "cannot accept work."** Every worker in a region reports through one shared service, so when that service became slow, all workers in the region stopped accepting new work at the same time and our router saw no available capacity. * **Several internal queries scanned the affected table without a narrowing filter.** That meant one locked row could block reads that were otherwise unrelated to it, which is what allowed the backlog to grow large enough to be disruptive on release. ### Scope of Impact Ingress creation was the most affected API: at the worst point in each window, 50.3%, 62.4% and 58.1% of `CreateIngress` requests returned server errors. Many failed requests are retried automatically, so the share of ingresses that ultimately could not be created is lower than those figures suggest. Starting a new egress was largely unaffected, staying under 2% throughout. SIP was affected at the end of each window, with `CreateSIPParticipant` reaching 7.50% and between 1.3% and 2.2% of attempted inbound calls failing during call setup; calls already connected were unaffected. Room management APIs stayed below 0.5%. Realtime connections were not affected, and media already flowing continued normally. The more consequential impact was to recordings already in progress. Up to 16.5% of egresses started during an affected window ended prematurely — 0.39% of all egresses that day — and did so without surfacing an error to indicate the recording had failed. ### Mitigations and Follow-ups Completed: * We have set a database-side idle transaction timeout so an abandoned transaction can no longer hold locks for more than 10 seconds. This caps both the wait and the size of any backlog that can accumulate behind it. We have verified this against a reproduction of the original failure. Underway: * We are removing an unnecessary transaction wrapper around single-statement writes, which shrinks the window in which a dropped connection can leave locks held. * We are adding database-side statement and lock timeouts so that no query can wait indefinitely on a lock. * We are changing recording workers so that a single status-reporting failure no longer removes an entire regional fleet from service. * We are making egress startup retry transient database errors rather than aborting the job. We appreciate your understanding and are committed to continuously improving our platform's reliability. If you have any questions, please reach out to our support team.

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Corrections

None so far.

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