Intermittent Playback Performance issues

On Wednesday, May 14, 2025, from 5:15 to 5:46 PM EDT, Vimeo users experienced issues with video playback, along with delays in uploading, transcoding, transcription, and other features.

Users might have seen a blank screen, a video stuck on the first frame, or an error message when they attempted to play a video.

The incident was triggered by a bug introduced in a core playback service, which caused it to crash repeatedly. This unintentional loop stressed a separate internal service, which triggered delays in our job processing and subsequently affected uploads and transcoding, among other services.

The underlying cause was not immediately apparent, and initial mitigation attempts didn’t resolve the issue. Once the cause was identified, we rolled back the deployment that contained the bug, which restored normal functionality.

To help prevent a recurrence, we’re making the affected service more robust and exploring fallback mechanisms in related services to reduce their dependency on it.