Postmortem: DNS Provider Outage (February 10, 2026)
Blog post from Clerk
On February 10, 2026, Clerk experienced a DNS provider failure that caused an outage affecting the resolution of its APIs for 2 hours and 32 minutes, with over 95% of expected API traffic still reaching their infrastructure due to DNS caching, fallback servers, and emergency guidance. This issue led to a complete service outage for some applications, inaccessible dashboards, and undelivered or misrouted authentication emails. Clerk acknowledged the absence of a failover strategy and is now working on adding DNS redundancy and decoupling their DNS provider from their domain registrar to prevent future disruptions. They also plan to enhance alert systems to better monitor authoritative nameservers' health. Clerk expressed regret for the incident's impact and assured customers of ongoing efforts to improve infrastructure resilience and restore trust.