Postmortem: A Vercel Edge Function Timeout Caused Our Global API to Fail for 30 Minutes

On October 17, 2024, at 14:22 UTC, our global API experienced a complete outage lasting 30 minutes, caused by a misconfigured timeout setting on a Vercel Edge Function. This postmortem details the incident timeline, root cause, resolution steps, and long-term prevention measures.

Incident Timeline (All Times UTC)

14:22 : Monitoring alerts trigger for 100% error rate on global API endpoints. All user requests return 504 Gateway Timeout errors.

14:24 : On-call engineering team acknowledges the alert and begins investigating.…