Summary

From March 26, 2025 to April 7, 2025, some users experienced intermittent issues with video playback.

If users tried to play videos, they may have seen a “Sorry, this video does not exist” error message. The incident on April 7th 2025 also impacted live events and the OTT player. 

Early attempts to solve the problem were unsuccessful before normal operations were restored. The root cause was an underlying player service suffering from performance issues and inefficient load balancing. Traffic surges pushed this service over a healthy capacity, leading to elevated error rates. 

Resolution

The March 26th outage is the first one that triggered an alert from the Vimeo availability alerting function. Work had already begun on replacing an aging component of the player infrastructure and the timeline for deployment of that update has been accelerated.

In the meantime, changes to the underlying RPC layer have improved performance allowing the infrastructure to handle existing loads more efficiently.

Prevention 

To prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future, we are updating the architecture of our internal player services to improve latency and connection handling. This improvement is already in internal testing and should be deployed fully by the end of April. We are also inspecting our incident management process in order to address any future issues much more quickly.