Ops Community

Jan 4, 2026 · Operations

How a Missed Domain Renewal Crashed Our Site for 2 Hours – Full DNS Outage Postmortem

At 3:07 AM on August 15 2025 a critical alert indicated the entire site was inaccessible, leading to a 2‑hour, 500 k‑user outage caused by an expired domain that entered serverHold status, and this postmortem details the detection, root‑cause analysis, emergency recovery steps, and long‑term remediation measures.