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Upstash · Data and observabilityMay 8, 2026, 09:46 UTC

QStash US Region Service Disruption

CriticalBugUpdated 20h ago
May 8, 09:46 UTCMay 8, 10:08 UTC
Duration
22m
Impact
Critical
Root cause
Bug
Upstash, 90 days
5 incidents
Affected
US-EAST-1QStash - US-EAST-1
Status page

Final update

**Root Cause Analysis** On **April 24**, we deployed a more optimized scheduler implementation in the **US East \(N. Virginia\)** region. On **May 8**, a user who had active schedules deleted their account. Under normal behavior, scheduled tasks associated with a deleted account should wake up, detect that the account no longer exists, and exit after performing cleanup. Due to a bug introduced in the new scheduler implementation, this code path did not return early as intended. Execution continued and resulted in a nil pointer dereference. A second issue then amplified the impact. When a panic occurs in the scheduler, it is designed to be recovered, logged, and isolated so that the process remains healthy. Because of another bug in the panic recovery path, the panic was not properly caught, which caused the worker process handling the scheduled job to terminate. After that process exited, another worker picked up responsibility for delivering the same scheduled task. Since the same faulty execution path was still present, that worker also failed. This created a cascading failure pattern across workers attempting to process the affected schedules. **Resolution** We deployed tw

Timeline

  1. Postmortem · May 12, 08:25 UTC
    **Root Cause Analysis** On **April 24**, we deployed a more optimized scheduler implementation in the **US East \(N. Virginia\)** region. On **May 8**, a user who had active schedules deleted their account. Under normal behavior, scheduled tasks associated with a deleted account should wake up, detect that the account no longer exists, and exit after performing cleanup. Due to a bug introduced in the new scheduler implementation, this code path did not return early as intended. Execution continued and resulted in a nil pointer dereference. A second issue then amplified the impact. When a panic occurs in the scheduler, it is designed to be recovered, logged, and isolated so that the process remains healthy. Because of another bug in the panic recovery path, the panic was not properly caught, which caused the worker process handling the scheduled job to terminate. After that process exited, another worker picked up responsibility for delivering the same scheduled task. Since the same faulty execution path was still present, that worker also failed. This created a cascading failure pattern across workers attempting to process the affected schedules. **Resolution** We deployed two fixes: * Added the missing early return in the deleted-account cleanup path, preventing the nil pointer dereference. * Corrected the panic recovery logic so that future panics are safely recovered, logged, and reported without causing worker processes to terminate. With these changes in place, the
  2. Resolved · May 8, 10:08 UTC
    This incident has been resolved, we will publish RCA soon.
  3. Monitoring · May 8, 10:06 UTC
    A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.
  4. Investigating · May 8, 09:46 UTC
    We are continuing to investigate this issue.
  5. Investigating · May 8, 09:46 UTC
    We are currently investigating the issue.

More from Upstash

Full history

Also caused by software bug

All
StartedIncidentDuration
Sep 1518:57 UTCClickPipes failing on Kinesis in AWS us-east-1ClickHouse29h 46m
Sep 318:20 UTCRetroactive Incident: Twilio Personalized Support Phone Line AffectedTwilio0m
Aug 819:48 UTCAlerting expressions pipeline failing when recovery settingsGrafana Labs0m
Aug 615:22 UTCIncident with ActionsGitHub10h 42m
Jul 2314:14 UTC[Medium] Issues with Box HubsBox16m
Jun 1719:00 UTCIncident With WebhooksGitHub0m

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