Neo4j Aura experienced a minor incident on August 19, 2025 affecting AuraDB Virtual Dedicated Cloud on AWS (*.databases.neo4j.io) and AuraDB Professional on AWS (*.databases.neo4j.io) and 1 more component, lasting 2h 44m. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- investigating Aug 19, 2025, 09:19 AM UTC
We are currently investigating an issue with backups. We will update shortly as we get more details
- investigating Aug 19, 2025, 10:05 AM UTC
We are continuing to investigate the issue with backups. New backups after 0:00 last night are failing to complete. Existing backups are unaffected and remain available.
- investigating Aug 19, 2025, 10:34 AM UTC
We are continuing to investigate this issue.
- investigating Aug 19, 2025, 10:51 AM UTC
We continue to investigate and have identified the issue more clearly. Beyond backups, other operations are also affected: pause and clone. Operations may fail or take a long time to complete.
- monitoring Aug 19, 2025, 11:30 AM UTC
The fix has been deployed and we will continue to monitor this incident.
- resolved Aug 19, 2025, 12:04 PM UTC
This incident has been resolved.
- postmortem Sep 12, 2025, 07:41 PM UTC
### What happened On August 18, 2025, at 19:18 UTC, the release of a faulty component in Neo4j Aura impacted the ability to perform backups of customer instances. The problem was identified when a critical component was updated without aligning with another dependent component, leading to failed backup attempts. This resulted in Neo4j not being able to take backups of customer instances for a period of approximately 17 hours. Our team quickly identified the root cause and began mitigation efforts early on August 19, 2025. By 11:54 UTC, the issue was fully resolved, and normal backup operations resumed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and are taking steps to prevent similar issues in the future. The issue arose because the deployment of the neo4j-backup system was not properly synchronized with the deployment of the neo4j-operator. This misalignment led to critical changes being introduced that impacted the ability to create new backups effectively. Essentially, the two components were not updated in harmony, which caused disruptions in the backup process. ### How customers were affected Customers were unable to get successful backups of their instances for 17 hours. We promptly addressed the issue by reverting the recent backup changes that caused disruptions and ensured the stability of our service by cleaning up old, failing backups. ### What we are doing now Neo4j remains committed to providing reliable service and is implementing additional safeguards to prevent similar incidents in the future. New mitigations being deployed: * Enhancing our monitoring systems to detect similar issues faster * Implementing additional automated checks to prevent service disruptions * Improving our service resilience to handle similar scenarios