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CircleCI suffering 'degraded performance' for hours

DevOps platform tells devs it is ‘continuing to work on a longer-term fix’

Updated DevOps outfit CircleCI is suffering from performance issues that have been ongoing for most of the day, with developers left waiting for the platform to come back online.

The service keeps an eye on the likes of GitHub and Bitbucket and fires off a build when commits are made. It then tests builds and pings out notifications if things go wrong. The platform also features a managed cloud service.

However, today things went a bit awry. CircleCI described the issue as "degraded performance," which had begun with "database read/write delays." Meanwhile, over on Twitter, the firm promoted a Lego raffle as users became increasingly antsy.

As the day dragged on, the company upgraded the situation to an "Incident" as it searched for the root cause.

By the afternoon, it told users: "We are applying changes to ensure that builds are running as usual. Thank you for bearing with us."

At the time of publication, it had "deployed some mitigation to get more work through our system and continue to work on a longer-term fix," but devs were still reporting issues.

The problem with developers is that they are all too familiar with code changes that upset the apple cart, and (as is often the case) several took to Twitter to vent their frustration at the situation.

CircleCI's DevOps wares were originally limited to being a cloud-only SaaS when the company launched in 2011, with a self-hosted version not available until 2015's Server product arrived.

In 2019, the software testing and delivery company suffered a security incident involving "a third-party analytics vendor." It said at the time that the attacker was able to "improperly access some user data in our vendor account, including usernames and email addresses associated with GitHub and Bitbucket, along with user IP addresses and user agent strings."

No source code, build logs or other production data had been at risk, it said, nor was any authentication or password data lost. It said it would upgrade security together with the vendor.

The Register contacted the company to get its take on the current outage and will update should there be a response.

In the meantime, the (so far) near day-long outage is a reminder of the risks of cloud dependency. CircleCI is not the only service to experience a wobble (dare we mention GitHub and its woes?) but when one gets used to something working just so, its failure is felt all the more keenly.

Still, all the more time to enter that Nintendo Lego competition, eh? ®

Updated to add

CircleCI tells The Register that the issue has now been fixed. Let us know if not in the forums.

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