RaceGorilla Sport Timing
RaceGorilla

Sports timing via your smartphone

RaceGorilla outage on Mar 11th

The entire RaceGorilla team apologizes for the server outage which happened yesterday March 11th 2026. We apologize to the athletes, organisers and volunteers who put in a lot of effort and rely on our timing platform for the success of their event.

What happened?

Due to the size and success of the CHAMPION RACE and the large number of online viewers the servers got overloaded. Around approximately 15h00 and 20h15 (CET), the RaceGorilla API experienced two outages lasting around 30minutes (first outage) and 5-10 minutes (second outage). During these moments, the platform could not be used.

Cause

The high number of viewers following the competition’s live results exposed a memory issue on our server. A caching inefficiency caused the server’s memory to fill up, which led to automatic restarts of certain services. These restarts, together with the high viewer load caused the server to crash.

What we did to solve it

During the day (15h25) we deployed a new server version which included a first optimization. This provided not to be enough due to which around 20h15 the issue surfaced again. During the evening and night we’ve thoroughly re-written parts of the caching mechanism for better performance.

Actions which were taken are:

  1. We deployed an optimized version of our caching system that drastically reduced memory usage per cached result
  2. We cleared accumulated stale data that was consuming server memory unnecessarily
  3. We added safeguards to prevent memory from growing beyond safe limits in the future

Current status

The server is now running stable again, we have deployed another improvement Today (March 12th), and se significant improvements.

We’ve also added extra monitoring and alerting to detect anomalies from an earlier stage.

Planned actions

  1. Investigation of all timing data (in progress)

We apologize once more for the inconvenience and thank you for using RaceGorilla.

– Robert

This post will be updated with new information and findings while the investigation is ongoing.
Last update: March 12th 2026, 23h50 CET