Beginning approximately mid-September, a risk of serious customer impact to the Linode API and Cloud Manager surfaced due to continued increases in traffic from unoptimized queries to the management database. This resource utilization increase did result in intermittent and brief periods of database connection rejections which resolved automatically. Akamai analyzed and optimized identified queries, moving queries to target read-only resources where possible. We also made firmware changes to database firmware during a scheduled maintenance on October 1, 2025, which was a step towards long-term stability of this system. Due to the efforts and actions taken to optimize load on this system, we have not seen any issues since October 7, 2025. 

To prevent this issue from occurring in the future, we have instituted and will continue to iterate on finer-grained monitoring and alerting to quickly ascertain which applications are causing additional unoptimized load. We have also instituted a more rigorous process to review and optimize traffic on an ongoing basis.

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.