Lever experienced a critical incident on October 3, 2025 affecting Career Site and Hire, lasting 1h 58m. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- identified Oct 03, 2025, 09:44 PM UTC
At 2:04pm PDT we identified an issue causing Lever-hosted job sites and Postings API to be down. Users will notice a looping loading wheel and the page may timeout while loading. We are actively investigating the issue to implement a fix. Additional updates will be provided as soon as a resolution is in place.
- identified Oct 03, 2025, 09:52 PM UTC
We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue.
- identified Oct 03, 2025, 10:09 PM UTC
We have implemented a fix for the issue. All Lever-hosted job site services should be available. We are continuing to monitor.
- monitoring Oct 03, 2025, 10:10 PM UTC
A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.
- resolved Oct 03, 2025, 11:01 PM UTC
This incident has been resolved.
- postmortem Oct 16, 2025, 03:49 PM UTC
## **Incident RCA: Job Site Outage** **Incident Date:** October 3, 2025 **Start Time:** 4:51 PM ET **End Time:** 6:00 PM ET ### **Impact Summary** Between 4:51 PM and 6:00 PM ET on October 3, 2025, users experienced degraded performance and eventual unavailability across multiple job boards. ### **Root Cause** The outage was triggered by an unexpected pattern of incoming requests that, while not unusually high in volume, each initiated resource-intensive queries. This combination of request frequency and prolonged query execution overwhelmed backend systems, leading to degraded performance and service unavailability. The traffic resembled automated crawling behavior, which our systems were not optimized to handle at that level of query complexity and concurrency. ### **Resolution** To reduce server load and restore service availability, the impacted job site was temporarily disabled. This action immediately alleviated pressure on backend systems and allowed all job boards to recover. The site remained offline over the weekend and was re-enabled on October 6, 2025, after Engineering confirmed that the irregular traffic had subsided. ### **Preventive Actions** To prevent similar incidents in the future, the following measures have been implemented: * **Enhanced Caching:** Improvements to our job site caching mechanisms now limit the ability of similar request patterns to generate excessive server queries. * **Updated Crawling Guidelines:** We have revised our web crawling directives to encourage automated crawlers to reduce the frequency of their requests. This change helps maintain system stability by minimizing the impact of high-volume automated traffic from compliant sources.