What's up with the constant high latency and errors lately?

Hey @darcy,

I run the Support team and would be happy to talk with you about this.

Let’s start with a message from our head of engineering - my boss Dana. This is a statement she made a while ago which still holds true:

Her message highlights a big part of why you’ve seen so many incidents listed there - we often list incidents that impact only a small handful of customers, because we have a company value of transparency and try to live it even when the news isn’t good. Why might you not be impacted by a reported outage? for instance: If your site is cached well on our CDN, it is usually the case that most incidents have no impact on serving your site.

Another thing to consider is that we generally don’t use our statuspage for root cause analysis (we have posted a very small number there, but generally we send them 1:1 to customers who request them in the helpdesk, rather than posting on statuspage; generally we get few requests.) If the impact is larger, we’ll post a blog post like these:

…but the reality is that while we do a root cause analysis for every customer-facing incident (and some that are not even directly customer-impacting, such as failures in our backups), but we do it in a call a day or two after the incident, where all affected teams can join that call, and collaborate on improving our service to prevent recurrence. This call is not something that happens during an incident to the level which we’d need, to report meaningfully about next steps on directly on our statuspage.

All of this is not me trying to deny what you’ve observed: we report many service degradations, particularly in the past 2 quarters! Our network and operations teams are constantly working to mitigate problems with our CDN and service and the results are that we have generally been improving our uptime and performance - even though we are reporting more downtimes, they tend to be shorter and less impactful, which means the work our teams are doing is working.

Of course, if you need a contractual guarantee of uptime, that is available on our Enterprise plans. I understand that isn’t what you were asking for, but for the next person who perhaps is looking for a mitigation for the problem such as a refund in case of problems - it does exist, at our higher account levels.