Buildkite service disruption
For the last week we have been internally testing our agent traffic running on our new EKS infrastructure successfully. At 23:01 11 August 2026 UTC we started routing <1% of agent traffic for a small subset of our customer to this EKS infrastructure. Within that subset of customers, any that were using an agent version < 3.97.0 saw an error "failed to decode JSON response: invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value". These older agents crashed once they received that error, which for some customers triggered repeated agent cycling. We reverted the routing to EKS infrastructure at 03:25 UTC after being alerted to the issue.
The latest update from Buildkite.
State
Resolved
Started
81 d ago
2026-08-12 02:44 UTC
Lasted
1 h 25 min
until 2026-08-12 04:08 UTC
Worst impact
Degraded
Timeline
5 updatesInvestigating
16 min 18%
Identified
28 min 33%
Monitoring
41 min 49%
Updates
Times in UTCAs posted by Buildkite
For the last week we have been internally testing our agent traffic running on our new EKS infrastructure successfully. At 23:01 11 August 2026 UTC we started routing <1% of agent traffic for a small subset of our customer to this EKS infrastructure. Within that subset of customers, any that were using an agent version < 3.97.0 saw an error "failed to decode JSON response: invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value". These older agents crashed once they received that error, which for some customers triggered repeated agent cycling. We reverted the routing to EKS infrastructure at 03:25 UTC after being alerted to the issue.
We have reverted the change which introduced the elevated error rate. We believe the issue to be resolved but will continue to monitor.
For a subset of customers, <1% of their Agent API traffic is experiencing issues. We are rolling back the change that caused this issue while we investigate it further.
We're seeing increased latency and error rates for a subset of our customers. We're currently addressing the cause and will provide status updates as they become available.
We've spotted that something has gone wrong. We're currently investigating the issue, and will provide an update soon.
Affected components
1Buildkite in the last 90 days
Full historyIncidents in 90 days
26
Days with an incident
26
Median duration
1 h 9 min
This incident
1.2× the median
Other Buildkite incidents
All incidentsBuildkite·Elevated job dispatch times
We are seeing the job dispatch times are back to normal.
Buildkite·Increased latency and error rates
We identified that the majority of the impact was for a single customer and was caused by a database failover. We are investigating the cause and we will work with the impacted customer.
Buildkite·Elevated error rates
Between 23:16 and 23:27 we saw elevated error rates across our platform due to a scheduled database upgrade. That upgrade was not intended to cause any impact, but due to an unforeseen dependency on this database customers experienced error rates averages 2.5% during this period.
Buildkite·Delays with Hosted Agents jobs
Processing of Hosted Agents jobs are no longer delayed.
Buildkite·Buildkite response to the eMudhra certificate compromise
All services that power Buildkite have been updated to distrust the affected certificates, and updated releases are available for the components we distribute that run in customer infrastructure: Buildkite agent: v4.7.0 and v3.138.2 Buildkite CLI: v3.64.2 bktec: v3.3.1 elastic-ci-stack-for-aws: v7.8.0 agent-stack-k8s: v0.52.0 We recommend updating to these versions to prevent exposure to the affected certificate providers.
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