LiveKit outage: Increased Latency in RoomService APIs, brief period of higher error rate

Affected components

• Global Real Time Communication

1. postmortemApr 17, 2026, 16:37 UTC

   ## Summary LiveKit's core realtime and agent services are designed to tolerate database failures. WebRTC media, SIP calls, and hosted agent sessions continue to operate even when our database backend is slow or unavailable. A subset of Room APIs, specifically `CreateRoom`, `DeleteRoom`, and `UpdateRoomMetadata`, do depend on a database for consistency and disaster recovery. That database is highly available and globally distributed, with no single point of failure. When it is under significant contention, these Room APIs can return errors or time out, while realtime traffic continues to flow normally. On 2026-04-15, database contention caused a percentage of Room API calls to fail in our US-West region. Remediation work later produced a 26-minute global outage of the Room APIs. Realtime sessions, SIP calls, and agent processes were unaffected throughout. We sincerely apologize to customers whose applications were disrupted during this incident. ## Impact The incident had two dist

2. resolvedApr 16, 2026, 04:09 UTC

   This issue is now fully resolved. We will be posting a detailed RCA.

3. monitoringApr 16, 2026, 03:51 UTC

   Our fix is fully implemented and we are not seeing any more failures or high latencies of the RoomService APIs. We are continuing to monitor the issue. We did observe a period of 15 minutes with high API failures while mitigation steps were being applied.

4. investigatingApr 16, 2026, 03:45 UTC

   While applying a fix for the API latencies, we are temporarily seeing increased failure rates in RoomServices APIs, including CreateRoom, UpdateRoomMetadata, and DeleteRoom. We are actively working on mitigating this. Impact has been upgraded to major.

5. identifiedApr 16, 2026, 02:10 UTC

   We continue to see the long Room API latencies which are now also impacting other regions. The latency increases appear to originate from a specific table in our distributed database. The issue has been escalated with the database vendor and we are working on a workaround for decreasing the API latencies. Other services are not impacted.

6. investigatingApr 16, 2026, 01:07 UTC

   We believe these elevated latencies began around 22:00 UTC. We have confirmed that only API requests in US-West should be impacted. The current list of impacted APIs appears to be CreateRoom, DeleteRoom, and UpdateRoomMetadata. We are working on mitigating the issue to return latencies back to normal.

7. investigatingApr 16, 2026, 00:13 UTC

   We are continuing to investigate this issue.

8. investigatingApr 15, 2026, 23:23 UTC

   We are investigating reports of increased latencies in RoomService APIs in the US West region, specifically on CreateRoom, DeleteRoom, and UpdateRoomMetadata APIs.

What APIStatus.watch saw

Our 5-minute checks didn't record a change in LiveKit's overall status around this incident. Smaller or regional incidents often leave a provider's overall status green.

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How often does LiveKit have incidents?

LiveKit reported 18 incidents in the last 90 days, 2 of them major or critical. A typical incident lasted 1h 31m. See LiveKit's uptime and incident history