---
title: "Making the best of a bad situation: Lessons from an Intercom outage - The Intercom Blog"
description: "Intercom’s outage began with a page about elevated exceptions, leading engineers to dive into Datadog and uncover a lurking 32-bit integer limit in one of the most critical parts of the app’s data model. The chaotic five-hour incident marathon required monkey patches, data migrations, and feature flag gymnastics to restore normal operations. After stabilizing the system, the team applied important technical changes to the Rails application to prevent integer overflow and similar failures. Miles McGuire presented the postmortem at Rails World 2024, sharing the debugging process and the key lessons learned from the unusual incident. The talk covers monitoring data model limits, using feature flags for safe rollouts, and enhancing application resilience to avoid future recurrence."
---

# Making the best of a bad situation: Lessons from an Intercom outage - The Intercom Blog

[Intercom](https://yomu.fyi/company/intercom) · Oct 5, 2026

**Type:** Incident / postmortem

## Summary

Intercom’s outage began with a page about elevated exceptions, leading engineers to dive into Datadog and uncover a lurking 32-bit integer limit in one of the most critical parts of the app’s data model. The chaotic five-hour incident marathon required monkey patches, data migrations, and feature flag gymnastics to restore normal operations. After stabilizing the system, the team applied important technical changes to the Rails application to prevent integer overflow and similar failures. Miles McGuire presented the postmortem at Rails World 2024, sharing the debugging process and the key lessons learned from the unusual incident. The talk covers monitoring data model limits, using feature flags for safe rollouts, and enhancing application resilience to avoid future recurrence.

## Takeaways

- A 32-bit integer limit in a critical data model was the root cause of a major Intercom outage.
- The incident response required a combination of monkey patches, data migrations, and feature flag toggling to restore service.
- Post-incident changes aimed at making the Rails application more resilient included monitoring integer limits and enhancing data model robustness.

## FAQ

### What caused the Intercom outage?

The outage was triggered by a 32-bit integer limit in one of the most critical parts of the app's data model, which led to elevated exceptions.

### How did Intercom respond to the outage?

The response involved a five-hour incident marathon using monkey patches, data migrations, and feature flag gymnastics to restore normal operations.

### What lessons were learned from the outage?

Key lessons included the importance of monitoring data model limits, using feature flags for safe rollouts, and building application resilience to avoid similar failures.

**Tags:** [Incident Response](https://yomu.fyi/topic/incident-response), [Reliability](https://yomu.fyi/topic/reliability), [Ruby on Rails](https://yomu.fyi/topic/ruby-on-rails)

- Source: [Intercom](https://www.intercom.com/blog/videos/rails-world-2024-intercom-outage)
- Source URL: https://www.intercom.com/blog/videos/rails-world-2024-intercom-outage
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-10-05T18:00:23.382Z

[Read original post](https://www.intercom.com/blog/videos/rails-world-2024-intercom-outage)