Incident Postmortem: Unusual Traffic Spike on Onboarding Flow
Date: 27 Nov 2025
Status: Resolved
Summary
A sudden surge of automated traffic targeted our onboarding endpoints, leading to temporary disruption of new account creation and waitlist submissions. The rest of the platform remained stable.
Impact
- Some users were unable to sign up or join the waitlist.
- No existing accounts or core services were affected.
- No data access or data loss occurred.
Root Cause
The disruption was triggered by a coordinated burst of scripted traffic directed at publicly accessible onboarding routes. While the traffic did not penetrate any protected systems, it overwhelmed rate limits and triggered protective shutdowns.
Mitigation & Resolution
- Temporarily disabled the affected onboarding services.
- Added additional screening and validation layers to reduce abusive traffic.
- Cleaned up invalid/bot-created entries.
- Restored all services after confirming system stability.
Prevention & Next Steps
To minimize the risk of similar events, we are:
- Strengthening traffic filtering and automated abuse protections.
- Improving monitoring around onboarding endpoints.
- Enhancing alerting thresholds to respond faster.
- Reviewing all public-facing flows for additional hardening opportunities.
Final Note
The incident has been fully resolved and systems are stable. We appreciate your patience as we reinforced our protections.