Summary
Between August 19, 2016 10:38 am and 11:09 am, our systems experienced higher response times. Address validation and some USPS labels requests timed out and returned 500 server errors.
Root Cause
The problem was caused by a temporary outage of the USPS Address Validation API, which is an external dependency of Shippo's address validation endpoint. The address validation and label generation APIs incorrectly handled the USPS API timeout and returned a 500 internal server error instead of a well-formatted error message.
Actions taken
We sincerely apologize for the interruption in service caused by this outage. We know that your business relies on Shippo and that such incidents have direct consequences on your operations. It's our highest priority to offer a reliable and performant service and we're committed to preventing any such incidents in the future.