Heroku’s 6-Hour Outage Actually Helped Our Company

When Heroku went down for 6 hours, we didn’t panic, at first.

We assumed it would be back soon.

But then an hour passed. Then two.

Deploys stopped working. The logs were gone. Even the dashboard was down.

We had a bug in production that needed fixing, and we were stuck watching the clock.

It was frustrating, but also eye-opening.

We were too comfortable

We’d been using Heroku for years. It was simple, fast, and reliable (most of the time).

But somewhere along the way, we stopped thinking about what would happen if it failed.

This outage made us realise:

We had no real backup plan.
Everything depended on one platform, and that platform had just disappeared for an entire workday.

Now here’s where things changed.

We had casually checked out a tool called Kuberns a few weeks earlier.

Didn’t switch to it. Just bookmarked it as “something worth exploring later.”

But when Heroku went down, we gave it a shot.

We weren’t expecting magic; we just wanted something that worked.

Surprisingly, it did.

• We got our backend deployed to AWS within 20 minutes
• We didn’t need to write scripts or configure pipelines
• Most importantly, we could see what was happening during the deploy

It felt like we were back in control.

Heroku’s outage wasn’t a disaster for us.

In fact, it gave us the push we needed to rethink how we deploy apps.

We didn’t leave Heroku immediately, but we stopped putting all our trust in it.

Today, we deploy across multiple systems. Heroku is still in the mix, but Kuberns has taken on a bigger role and we’re better off for it.

Sometimes the thing that breaks your workflow is the thing that improves it the most.

That 6-hour outage forced us to re-evaluate, clean up our infrastructure habits, and find tools that give us visibility and simplicity.

Honestly, glad it happened.