Vimeo Outage History

# **What happened** On September 4, between approximately 10:00 AM and 11:00 AM EDT, some Vimeo users experienced partially rendered pages across the site. Affected pages displayed the top menu bar but were missing portions of the expected page content. # **What caused it** During a site update, some required files weren’t uploaded correctly. # **How we responded** We received internal notification of the issue almost as it occurred and began investigating immediately. We quickly confirmed the outage and reverted to a prior stable version of Vimeo. This restored all affected pages within one hour. We then investigated the root cause and implemented a permanent fix by roughly 1:30 PM. # **What we’re doing to prevent a recurrence** We changed the order in which Vimeo source code is uploaded and checked so that lagging updates won’t cause similar outages in the future.

# **What happened** On August 19, between approximately 12:45 PM and 2:00 PM EDT, Vimeo Enterprise customers were unable to access their video libraries or play videos through our China delivery solution. # **What caused it** Our third-party hosting provider experienced an outage that disrupted data access between Mainland China and other regions. # **How we responded** Our internal monitoring systems brought this issue to our attention. We began investigating it immediately, determined that the cause was external, and confirmed the outage with our provider once their ability to provide status updates was restored. # **What we’re doing to prevent a recurrence** While outages caused by external infrastructure are outside our direct control, we’re improving our monitoring to include a continuous health check on the provider’s service, so that we know from the outset whether the outage is external.

# **What happened** On July 31, between approximately 12:30 AM and 2:00 AM EDT, some logged-out Vimeo users encountered an issue when visiting the Vimeo home page. Instead of the expected content, impacted users received a blank screen with a brief error message. # **What caused it** Corrupted memory on the server side caused some isolated web server processes to fail. As a result, requests for the logged-out Vimeo home page that relied on these processes resulted in the error message. # **How we responded** We became aware of the outage within 30 minutes of the initial event and immediately began investigating. Once we confirmed the issue, we applied a manual fix to restore normal functionality. # **What we’re doing to prevent a recurrence** We’re improving our internal reporting to alert us to similar conditions sooner. We’re also making sure that future errors of this type generate our standard HTTP 500 error page instead of a blank screen with a technical readout.

# **What happened** On July 15, between approximately 11:00 AM and 2:00 PM EDT, some Vimeo users who uploaded videos experienced delays in playback. # **What caused it** A recent update introduced a bug into the video processing pipeline that prevented some processed videos from being marked as playable. As a result, affected videos appeared to be stuck in the optimization phase. # **How we responded** We promptly identified the bug, rolled back the changes, and deployed a script to mark the affected videos as playable. By 7:00 PM EDT, all impacted videos had been fixed. # **What we’re doing to prevent a recurrence** We’re reviewing our internal testing and monitoring policies to make bugs like the one that caused the incident easier to detect and harder to introduce in the first place.

On June 7, between approximately 1:00 AM and 6:00 AM EDT, Vimeo was inaccessible to some logged-in users due to failing requests to a crucial service. API requests might have returned HTTP status code 500 during this time. We determined that the characteristics of a critical database significantly delayed requests to the service and ultimately overwhelmed the Vimeo application. Once we scaled up the affected database, logged-in access was restored.

On Wednesday, May 21, 2025, from 1:45 to 5:00 AM EDT, Vimeo users experienced delays in video uploads, transcoding jobs, transcriptions, and related tasks. A small number of transcoding jobs failed during this time and were successfully reprocessed later in the morning. The incident was the result of delays in processing status notifications for new uploads. In response to this outage, we've implemented new systems to alert us of notification backlogs sooner. We've also implemented server-side changes to make the affected service more resilient to atypical behavior.