Prepared by: Mikel Wellsmore, CEO, Gorelo Report Date: May 22, 2026 Incident Severity: Critical
On May 20, 2026, Gorelo experienced a service disruption affecting our Azure IoT Hub. Symptoms began as light, intermittent connectivity drops earlier in the day (UTC) and progressively escalated into widespread asset connectivity failure. Active investigation began at 20:05 UTC and full service was restored at 22:50 UTC.
The disruption originated from a platform-side event on Microsoft Azure. No customer data was lost, exposed, or compromised.
| Phase | Start (UTC) | End (UTC) | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intermittent symptoms | Earlier May 20 | 20:05 | Gradual escalation |
| Active widespread outage | May 20, 20:05 | May 20, 22:50 | ~2h 45m |
All times UTC.
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| Earlier May 20 | Light, intermittent connectivity drops appear on a small number of assets and gradually increase through the day. |
| 20:05 | Symptoms reach widespread impact. Deep investigation begins. [Investigating] status posted. |
| 20:37 | Support case raised with Microsoft Azure. |
| 20:49 | Root cause traced to a throttling error on the Azure IoT Hub platform. [Identified] status posted. Customer workaround communicated: temporarily remove the Connectivity check from Base Server policy. |
| 21:51 | Microsoft support engineer actively engaged. [Update] status posted. |
| 22:31 | Microsoft applies changes on the Azure IoT Hub platform. Assets begin reconnecting. [Monitoring] status posted. |
| 22:50 | Full recovery confirmed. [Resolved] status posted. |
The disruption was caused by a platform-side event on the Azure IoT Hub service.
Microsoft has confirmed that maintenance activity was underway on the Azure IoT Hub platform at the time of the incident, which was not communicated to us in advance. This activity caused assets to disconnect and attempt to reconnect en masse, which exceeded platform-side connection thresholds and resulted in widespread throttling. All affected assets remained healthy locally; impact was limited to platform visibility.
Microsoft resolved the incident by applying changes on their platform to lift the affected limits, after which assets reconnected.
While the underlying event occurred on Microsoft's infrastructure, we recognise that our platform did not handle the reconnection event gracefully. We are introducing changes on our side to make our fleet more resilient to similar upstream events in future.