Outage report · Major outage

Census outage on Jan 5, 2026

Census Full Outage

SeverityMajor outage

StartedJan 5, 2026, 15:17UTC

ResolvedJan 5, 2026, 20:24UTC

Duration5h 7m

What happened

Census reported a major outage starting Jan 5, 2026, 15:17 UTC, affecting Census Sync Management UI, Sync Engine. It was marked resolved at Jan 5, 2026, 20:24 UTC.

The incident lasted 5h 7m from first report to resolution.
It was the 2nd longest of 8 significant outages Census reported in the 12 months up to it.
Census had reported no other partial or major outages in the 90 days before it.
6 other vendors we track reported a significant incident within 12 hours of it.

Latest update from Census

This incident has been resolved. Syncs have been running normally as of approximately 1:00pm EST, and the web has been running at normal latencies as of 2:00pm EST. The issue was caused by an indexing change on our side that impacted our ability to run syncs reliably. Recovery was delayed because we needed to rebuild the previous indexes. To avoid any risk of data loss, we chose a safer recovery approach that allowed the system to remain temporarily degraded while repairs were being completed. To restore syncs as quickly as possible, we prioritized sync execution and applied targeted fixes to improve performance. During this time, access to the UI was temporarily down.

Read Census's official incident report ↗