Welcome to the show.

While a different kind of incident (in hindsight), the other week Webflow had a serious operational incident.

Sites across the globe going down (no clue if all or just a part of them). They posted plenty of messages, I think for about 12 hours, but mostly with the same content/message: "working on fixing this with an upstream provider" (paraphrased). No meaningful info about what was the actual problem or impact.

Only the next day did somebody write about what happened. Essentially a database running out of storage space. How that became a single point of failure, to at least plenty of customers: no clue. Sounds like bad architecture to me though. But what personally rubbed me the wrong way most of all, was the insistence on their "dashboard" having indicated anything wrong with their database deployment, as it allegedly had misrepresented the used/allocated storage. I don't who this upstream service provider of Webflow is, but I know plenty about server maintenance.

Either that upstream provider didn't provide a crucial metric (on-disk storage use) on their "dashboard", or Webflow was throwing this provider under the bus for what may have been their own ignorant/incompetent database server management. I guess it all depends to which extend this database was a managed service or something Webflow had more direct control over. Either way, with any clue about the provider or service missing from their post-mortem, customers can only guess as to who was to blame for the outage.

I have a feeling that we probably aren't the only customer they lost over this. Which in our case would probably not have happened, if they had communicated things in a different way. For context: I personally would never need nor recommend something like Webflow, but I do understand why it might be the right fit for people in a different position. That is, as long as it doesn't break down like it did. I still can't quite wrap my head around that apparent single point of failure for a company the size of Webflow though.

/anecdote