Postmortem: A Vercel Edge Function Timeout Caused Our Global API to Fail for 30 Minutes On October 17, 2024, at 14:22 UTC, our global API experienced a complete outage lasting 30 minutes, caused by a misconfigured timeout setting on a Vercel Edge Function. This postmortem details the incident timeline, root cause, resolution steps, and long-term prevention measures. Incident Timeline (All Times UTC) 14:22 : Monitoring alerts trigger for 100% error rate on global API endpoints. All user requests return 504 Gateway Timeout errors. 14:24 : On-call engineering team acknowledges the alert and begins investigating. Initial checks show Vercel Edge Function logs reporting timeout errors for the core API handler. 14:27 : Team identifies the recent deployment of a configuration change to the Edge Function that reduced the execution timeout from 10 seconds to 1 second, below the average 2.8-second response time of downstream database queries.…