On Thursday, March 16th 2023, at 4:11 PM UTC, one of our database clusters started receiving an influx of unanticipated link safety verification requests from an external email client. This resulted in the database cluster being intermittently unresponsive, manifesting to the end user as the Web Experience being sluggish or not loading in some cases.
At 5:14 PM UTC, the unanticipated database connections were terminated, in effect restoring Web Experience functionality.
We have also deployed measures to appropriately handle future link safety verification requests, in order to prevent a recurrence of this issue.