Postmortems

Monday 4 January 2021

Post view stats issue

Summary

From November 20th, 2020 to January 4th, 2021, some Medium authors saw intermittent spikes in post view stats.

Impact

Wednesday 26 January 2018

Summary

On January 26th, 2018, Medium had a rolling outage from 4:51PM until 5:32PM.

Impact

A majority of requests to medium.com failed (including visits from a web browser, interactions from our…

Tuesday 19 September 2017

Crash on app launch for users running iOS 11

On September 19, 2017, version 3.3 of the Medium iOS app was released to the App Store. Apple released the official version of iOS 11 earlier that same day. Through a combination of…

Tuesday July 11th, 2017

Summary

On July 11th, 2017, Medium.com was not serving requests from 4:10 pm to 4:14 pm due to a deployment issue caused by a miscommunication.

Impact

Thursday 27 April, 2017

On April 27th at 7:20 AM PDT, a group of hackers made changes to a few publications that are hosted on Medium.com by gaining access to the Twitter account of one of our editorial administrators. We quickly stemmed all unauthorized access to these publications, halted the hack and worked…

Wednesday 18 January 2017

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attack on custom domains.

On Wednesday morning at 6:45am PST, custom domains on Medium were subject to a 350x increase in network traffic due to a Distributed Denial of Service…

Monday 31 October 2016

Outage on post pages

On Monday lunchtime a change was pushed to production that caused post pages to become unavailable. Due to an increase in load, a small percentage of traffic to other parts of the site were also intermittently unavailable…

Wednesday 22 June 2016

Outage on publication home pages

On Wednesday morning a change was pushed to production that caused some publication home pages to throw errors, including landing pages for hosted domains. Direct traffic to medium.com, CMS, and post pages was…

Thursday 3 March 2016

Medium Outage

On Thursday morning a change was made to how EC2 instances are provisioned. This change, combined with lack of termination protection on key long-lived instances and loose IAM policies, resulted in instances being removed in a key…