Summary

On 20 August 2026, beginning at approximately 15:00 UTC, the Harness platform experienced widespread performance degradation across all production environments. Pipeline executions that normally complete in around two minutes took seven to ten minutes. Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, pipeline orchestration, and Feature Management & Experimentation were all affected.

Google Cloud Platform experienced a multi-product incident in the us-west1 region affecting Bigtable, Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, and persistent-disk I/O. Harness production infrastructure runs on persistent disks in that region. The degradation raised database operation latency from approximately 2 ms to over 10 ms at the 95th percentile, which in turn caused message-queue processing lag and propagated to every service that depends on timely database access.

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Impact

This was a degradation, not an outage. Pipelines continued to execute and complete successfully throughout; they were slow rather than failing. No data was lost, and no customer work was dropped as a result of this incident.

Root cause

Harness production infrastructure in the affected environments runs on Google Cloud Platform persistent disks in the us-west1 region. When that storage layer degraded, the effect propagated through the platform in a predictable chain:

Persistent-disk I/O degradation in us-west1. Google Cloud Platform experienced a multi-product incident affecting Bigtable, Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, and persistent-disk performance. This was an infrastructure failure in the provider’s environment, outside Harness’s control.

Preventive actions

Although Harness cannot prevent a cloud provider infrastructure failure. The actions below are aimed at detecting one faster and being better positioned to act on it.

Action Continue routine pre-testing of targeted cross-region database failovers, as performed during this incident, to keep failover readiness verified rather than assumed Assess full-stack multi-region failover readiness for future scenarios in which cross-region latency would be unacceptable