SES service broker outage on August 5, 2026

Summary

From approximately 9:13 AM ET to 9:45 AM ET on Wednesday August 5, 2026, the SES service broker was unavailable. During this time, customers could not create, update, or delete brokered SES services.

The outage affected only the management of brokered SES services. Existing service instances and email delivery were not interrupted.

Impact

During the incident, customers were unable to:

• Create new brokered SES services
• Update existing brokered SES services
• Delete existing brokered SES services

No action was required from customers after service was restored.

Cause

An automated cleanup process deleted a container image that was still being used by the deployed SES service broker. When the broker restarted during a production deployment, it could not retrieve the image and failed to start.

Timeline

All times are Eastern Time.

• August 4, 4:24 AM - An automated pipeline created a new container image for the SES service broker
• August 4, 3:03 PM - An automated process deleted the container image used by the deployed broker
• August 5, 7:17 AM - A Cloud.gov production deployment began.
• August 5, approximately 9:13 AM - The broker attempted to restart but could not retrieve its container image.
• August 5, approximately 9:28 AM - The Cloud.gov team received an alert and began investigating.
• August 5, approximately 9:45 AM - Engineers manually redeployed the broker with an available container image and restored service.

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Resolution

Cloud.gov manually redeployed the SES service broker using an available container image. The team then reran the automated deployment pipeline and confirmed that the deployment and acceptance tests completed successfully.

Follow-up Actions

Cloud.gov is taking the following actions to reduce the risk of a similar incident and improve recovery:

• Improve monitoring and alerting for SES service broker outages.
• Update the container image cleanup process so it does not delete images that are still in use.
• Update the deployment process so the SES service broker references the intended current container image.

Thank you for your patience while we resolved this issue. Questions may be sent to us at support@cloud.gov.