On November 16, 2021, at 9:26PM ET, we received reports of delays in the publishing of new social posts. At 10:28PM, the root cause was identified and a fix was applied. At 11:46PM ET, all outstanding social posts were confirmed to be successfully published. There was no data loss of social posts as a result of this incident.
A database cleanup operation performed earlier that day required the restarting of an internal social post publishing service, which had not been performed at that time. Once this service was restarted, social posts were able to publish successfully.
We plan to improve our alerting to more quickly detect social posting delays. We also plan to perform future data cleanup operations in a way that prevents the need for service restarts.