The Canva engineering team recently published their post-mortem on the outage they experienced last November, detailing the API Gateway failure and the lessons learned during the incident. Brendan Humphreys, Canva’s CTO, acknowledges:
On November 12, 2024, Canva experienced a critical outage that affected the availability of canva.com. From 9:08 AM UTC to approximately 10:00 AM UTC, canva.com was unavailable. This was caused by our API Gateway cluster failing due to multiple factors, including a software deployment of Canva’s editor, a locking issue, and network issues in Cloudflare, our CDN provider.
Canva’s editor is a single-page application, deployed multiple times daily, with client devices fetching new assets through Cloudflare using a tiered caching…