On July 27, 2025, at approximately 08:30 UTC, Akamai services in the Newark, NJ (us-east) data center experienced a critical outage due to overheating of infrastructure. This overheating was triggered by a utility power failure at the facility, which resulted in the loss of HVAC functionality. Although the data center itself remained operational, the failure of the cooling system caused elevated temperatures that directly impacted Akamai hardware, leading to the shutdown of core services. The outage affected Linode Compute Instances (commonly referred to as 'Linodes'), Object Storage, NodeBalancers, and Linode Kubernetes Engine (LKE) within the Newark region. Additionally, internal dependencies on Newark infrastructure caused degraded performance for LKE services in other regions, including Dallas, Fremont, Sydney, Tokyo 2, Toronto, and Washington DC.

‌In response, we initiated mitigation efforts that included replacing failed network hardware, rerouting traffic away from Newark, and migrating impacted workloads to backup systems where possible. Restoration efforts were executed in phases once temperatures stabilized, prioritizing services based on severity and customer impact. While some services began recovering on July 28th, full recovery was completed by July 29th at 16:22 UTC.

We are currently conducting a comprehensive post-incident review to identify opportunities to improve our resilience. This includes auditing cross-region service dependencies that allowed an issue isolated to Newark to affect services elsewhere. We are also evaluating architectural improvements to better isolate services by region and increase fault tolerance. In parallel, we are reviewing our monitoring and alerting systems to improve early detection of cooling-related risks and ensure faster mitigation. Our commitment to transparency, accountability, and service reliability remains steadfast as we work to strengthen our systems and prevent future occurrences.

‌This summary provides an overview of our current understanding of the incident given the information available. Our investigation is ongoing and any information herein is subject to change.