Podio Server took too long to respond – July 2, 2025

Summary of Impact

On July 2nd 2025, part of Podio customers started facing high rate of server timeout errors when creating or updating application items. The delays and disruptions caused by the degraded server API performance were sporadic and lasting for several minutes each time.

Root Cause

On July 2nd 2025, our alert system noticed a sporadic increase in Podio related errors when executing workflows. In the meanwhile, the customer support team also received several reports for server errors while executing actions on app items – creating new or updating existing items. Both, the error rate increases and customer reports were intermittent, happening a couple of times during the day for several minutes and experienced by only part of Podio customers. The problem was traced to an end-user's workflow that was incorrectly configured and resulted in locking our database. This, in turn, made items management unavailable while the workflow execution was in progress.

Mitigation

After identifying the root cause, Podio team took the following actions:

• Engineering reported the traced workflow
• Customer support worked closely with the end-user to deactivate the workflow in order to mitigate the configuration issue. They also helped optimize the workflow to prevent this issue from re-occurring.

The issue was confirmed resolved and fixed as of July 16th, 2025.

Next Steps

1. Conduct review of Podio workflows and the specific workflow type that was the root cause for this incident
2. Optimize and improve performance of Podio workflows while processing high volume of data