Previous incidents

April 2025
Apr 16, 2025
1 incident

Delays and issues with sending

Resolved Apr 16 at 05:00pm EDT

TL;DR

Bad configuration on one of our self-hosted SMTP servers caused a crash that proved difficult to recover from, leaving lots of emails “stuck” in varying degrees – and their being stuck manifested in a slew of unpleasant ways. We’ve fixed the configuration, are investing (literally, right at this very moment) in better tooling and alerting, and are architecting a way to prevent this from ever happening again.

The gory details

Buttondown uses a number of providers to actually send...

Apr 10, 2025
1 incident

Dashboard and archives were timing out

Resolved Apr 10 at 09:33pm EDT

From 8:38pm EDT to 8:50pm EDT, we were serving 503s for around 75% of our incoming requests. This was purely due to a high burst of traffic that our scaling mitigated (albeit not quickly enough!) We're going to look into the problematic routes and harden their performance.

Apr 02, 2025
1 incident

Subscribers are mistakenly being marked as undeliverable.

Degraded

Resolved Apr 02 at 02:20pm EDT

The change has been reverted, and subscribers have been restored to their correct status.

There is no action required from authors.

There was no impact to subscriber-facing features.

2 previous updates

March 2025
Mar 28, 2025
1 incident

Large backlog in webhooks and automations

Degraded

Resolved Mar 28 at 08:18pm EDT

We've processed the backlog.

1 previous update

Mar 24, 2025
1 incident

Increased spam rate for custom domains

Degraded

Resolved Mar 25 at 02:51pm EDT

We've confirmed and resent the majority of our affected emails, and are in touch with authors with whom we haven't automatically resent on their behalf.

3 previous updates

Mar 14, 2025
1 incident

Emails were timing out

Resolved Mar 14 at 02:31pm EDT

Here is the not-so-fun thing about running an email service provider: you get malicious actors trying to use your infrastructure for, well, malice — phishing, spoofing, et cetera.

We have a lot of defenses in place for this, but we detected someone with a relatively novel approach of trying to pass in problematic URLs which we weren't catching. Our other various systems did catch and apprehend this user before they were able to send any emails, but in our haste to push forward a solution ...

February 2025
No incidents reported