Beginning at 18:09 UTC on March 9, 2026, approximately 25% of Compute hosts in our IAD3 (Washington DC) data center experienced degraded network connectivity due to the application of an updated routing configuration intended to improve network performance. This updated router configuration was extensively tested and has been running in production in another region for several weeks without any issues. An investigation revealed that application of this change inadvertently caused loss of connectivity to these host due to a network configuration specific to the IAD3 data center. 

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This resulted in loss of access and control of Linodes and clusters hosted on those machines until the issue was mitigated. Mitigation steps took longer than expected due to the specific networking nature of the issue and degradation of internal service visibility to impacted devices, which required additional planning to effectively apply a rollback to the prior configuration. 

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We were able to successfully rollback the routing configuration and mitigate impact at 21:16 UTC on March 9, 2026. To prevent a reoccurrence of this issue, we are developing a new routing configuration deployment plan that avoids the identified failure modes and others inferred from our observations.

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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.