On July 1st, 2020 at 8:19 UTC, our engineers identified an issue with data collection on multiple Hotjar tools.

What happened?

Between 1:00 AM and 6:45 AM UTC, multiple parts of the Hotjar product responsible for data collection were failing at the final stage of the data collection process. This led to Heatmaps, Incoming Feedback responses, and Recordings created during that time to appear broken, as well as the loss of Funnel data.

Why did this issue occur?

The issue was introduced on June 30th with a code change aiming at improving the performance of the Hotjar service. Due to the nature of the problem, it did not manifest itself immediately, but rather after a few hours from the code deployment.

What will we do to prevent this from happening in the future?

While some areas for improvement have already been identified, our engineers will hold an internal post-mortem to prevent this from happening again.