On Saturday, May 21, 2022, we experienced a service disruption that impacted a subset of customer live websites as well as multiple areas of our hosting product. In this postmortem, we will recap the incident and explain what we are doing in response.
At 09:29 UTC, the domain registration status on the kinsta.cloud domain was updated by the .cloud registry to include a serverHold
status. When this occurred, the domain was dropped from root DNS servers across the internet. This domain registration update resulted in potential downtime for customer live sites with domains pointed to Kinsta via a CNAME record. Additionally, all temporary URLs and phpMyAdmin URLs were unreachable since these are based on the kinsta.cloud domain name.
Once the source of the issue was confirmed, our team began multiple plans of attack over the course of the next ten hours.
We were able to identify steps customers could take to bring their live sites back online and communicated these options to customers via open chats. As we were preparing to update our status page with these steps, our registrar informed us at 21:42 UTC that they had removed the serverHold
status from the domain and within minutes all affected live sites, temporary URLs, and phpMyAdmin URLs were back online.
This incident has resulted in two action items.
The first action item involves our responsibility and selection of domain registrar. There are a wide variety of accredited registrars available for domain owners, and we will be transferring our domain registrations to a registrar that specializes in the security and protection needs of the enterprise market. We will begin this process by transferring the kinsta.cloud domain first with the rest of our company domains to follow.
The second action item we have outlined is to engage in communication with the .cloud registry to learn what we can do to ensure notifications occur before similar actions might be taken in the future. This has already proved to be valuable as the .cloud registry has placed kinsta.cloud on their allowlist to help prevent potential future recurrences.
Kinsta exists to serve our customers, and we deeply regret that a subset of customer live sites along with all staging sites and database access via phpMyAdmin were affected by this situation. We are committed to learning and growing as a team with the aim of living up to the trust you continue to place in us.