Our June 19th Outage Explained
Ryan Sokol serves as the Vice President of Engineering at DoorDash, where he leads all functions for the engineering team. Prior to joining DoorDash, Ryan led and scaled Uber Eats from its inception, overseeing a team of 250 engineers and serving on the Uber Eats executive leadership team. While at Uber, Ryan also led Uber’s Marketplace Platform team where he oversaw Core Dispatch and Uber’s primary application gateway. Before Uber, Ryan was Head of Engineering at Voxer and held various roles at Genentech, IBM and smaller technology consultancies including his own. Ryan sits on the executive team at DoorDash. He holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and currently resides in Orinda, California with his wife and two children.
Between 16:30 PDT and 18:40 PDT on June 19th 2021, DoorDash experienced a system-wide failure for approximately two hours that saddled merchants with undelivered meals, rendered Dasher’s unable to accept new deliveries or check in for new shifts, and left consumers unable to order food or receive their placed orders in a timely fashion via our platform. The cause was a cascading failure of multiple components in DoorDash’s platform, which put extreme load on our internal payments infrastructure, eventually causing it to fail. The current analysis shows no leading indication prior to the incident triggering at 16:30 PDT, with mitigation taking significantly longer than the standard we aim to hold ourselves to as an engineering team.
