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The Canva outage: another tale of saturation and resilience


Today’s public incident writeup comes courtesy of Brendan Humphries, the CTO of Canva. Like so many other incidents that came before, this is another tale of saturation, where the failure mod…

For Canva users in Asia, this meant that they experienced massive increases in latency when their web browsers attempted to fetch the javascript static assets from the CDN. Montgomery Scott, my nominee for patron saint of resilience engineering We attempted to work around this issue by significantly increasing the desired task count manually. The sort of adaptation that resilience demands requires human operators: our automation simply doesn’t have a sophisticated enough model of the world to be able to handle situations like the one that Canva found itself in.

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