Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

Incident: AM1 – API Print Delays
Date: August 20, 2026
Duration: 7:40 AM – 10:16 AM PDT

Summary

Some customers in the AM1 environment experienced delays when submitting print jobs through the API. During the incident, print jobs took longer than expected to process as a backlog developed within the printing services.

Root Cause

A temporary connectivity issue between core database and authentication services occurred at the same time as an unusually high volume of large print requests. Together, these conditions increased the load on the services responsible for routing and processing print jobs.

As communication between services became unstable, print jobs could not be processed at their normal rate, resulting in a temporary backlog and increased processing times.

Containment Actions

Our engineering team restarted the core services responsible for print job communication and execution tracking. This cleared the accumulated backlog, restored stable service connections, and returned API printing to normal performance.

Corrective Actions

We are optimizing how large print requests are prepared and transmitted by compressing or dividing large payloads into smaller segments before processing. This will help prevent individual requests from exceeding system message-size limits and affecting print processing.

Preventive Actions

We are implementing additional improvements to strengthen API printing resilience:

• Increasing capacity for large print requests to prevent high-volume jobs from placing excessive load on shared processing resources.
• Adding automatic overflow handling so oversized or failed requests can be safely isolated instead of affecting the overall print queue.
• Optimizing connection timeout thresholds to prevent temporary periods of high load from causing unnecessary service disconnections.

These improvements are intended to ensure that high-volume or unusually large print requests can be handled without affecting overall API printing performance.