PlanetScale Incident Report: Database Reparenting Issue

Status: Resolved (Partial outage)

Date: October 15-16, 2025

Summary

The service experienced a partial outage affecting a limited number of database branches in the GCP us-central1 region.

Timeline of Events

6:29 PM (Oct 15): Initial identification noted that a small number of databases in GCP us-central1 are stuck with “primary is not serving, there may be a reparent operation in progress.”

6:45 PM: Team began investigation and recovery efforts.

7:30 PM: Root cause identified as VM failures across multiple availability zones, requiring branch rescheduling.

7:44 PM: Investigation continued with ongoing monitoring.

8:31 PM: All databases recovered; continued close monitoring maintained.

1:52 AM (Oct 16): Final resolution confirmed with statement that no further disruption is expected, please contact support with any further issues.

Root Cause & Impact

PlanetScale experienced VM failures spanning multiple availability zones, which caused a subset of database branches to require rescheduling before recovery could occur. The incident affected Database Connectivity for Vitess on GCP across three components.