Linode (Akamai) outage on 2026-07-28: Service Issue - Host Job Performance Degradation - Several Regions

On 27 July 2026 at 3:30 UTC, Akamai observed an increase in errors when connecting to the Linode hosting database, primarily affecting Block Storage volume attachments. This resulted in host job failures and limited customer impact, with some users experiencing error messages and interrupted workflows. Elevated timeout rates were noted in logs for certain data center locations, coinciding with the incremental rollout of a new feature flag. Initial investigation revealed intermittent packet drops from the database proxy to client hosts during the TLS handshake. The current theory suggests that a DDoS-protection limit related to path MTU packet too big ICMP messages was reached. When the proxy sent TCP packets with a large MTU, the expected ICMP messages were dropped by Dallas gateway routers due to exceeding the configured allowable rate. This caused database proxy TCP connections to timeout to Compute Hosts. The issue was triggered by the enablement of the new feature flag, which changed the routing path and removed MTU clamping before packets reached the gateways. To mitigate the issue, Akamai rolled back the recent network change across affected Compute sites, starting at 20:50 UTC. As of 22:57 UTC, the rate of service restarts returned to pre-incident levels. Akamai is also planning a change to increase the allowable threshold for packet too big ICMP messages. This summary provides an overview of our current understanding of the incident given the information available. Our investigation is ongoing and any information herein is subject to change.