Render: Service instability in Singapore

Render has an incident open in Singapore: inbound traffic to Singapore services is impacted, deploys were affected earlier, and as of the 16:33 UTC update free service spin-ups from idle are temporarily disabled while they investigate.

Free services on Render sleep when idle and cold-start on the next request. With spin-ups switched off, a free service in Singapore that happened to be asleep when this began is not coming back until Render re-enables them. Not slow, not degraded, absent, with nothing on the owner's side to fix or redeploy.

Shedding cold starts is a reasonable lever to reach for. A spin-up from idle is close to the most expensive request a platform serves, and refusing them buys headroom for services already running. The cost is that the free tier in that region goes fully dark while paid services next to it are only degraded, and it arrives as one line inside an update about inbound traffic.

If something on a free plan in Singapore is unreachable right now, this is why.