ClickUp's Investment in Trust and Reliability

Our mission is to save people time by making the world more productive.

Over the past few weeks, we know that we haven’t lived up to this mission or our core value of delivering the best customer experience.

At ClickUp, we’re committed to transparency and taking ownership of the areas where we know we can improve. We’re hard at work on platform enhancements to earn back your trust, and we’re monitoring our platform around the clock to return our service to the availability and speed you expect from ClickUp.

With that in mind, we wanted to share the findings of our deep dive into these incidents, and also be transparent about where we’re investing to ensure this situation does not happen again.

A review of recent incidents

Our investigation into recent performance issues found that our outages were related to significantly increased load against our platform. A few discrete issues compounded and led to our service interruptions:

A code change in February that increased database load for attaching files to a task
Our database processing speed needed adjusting for peak usage
Increased API calls in specific use-cases that led to a dramatic increase in server load

We’ve already made direct fixes to resolve the issues from the past few weeks, and are confident our updates will prevent similar issues from happening again in the future.

We are committed to delivering a platform that is fast, enjoyable to use, and aligned with our vision to be the productivity platform that can save you at least one day a week.

Upcoming investments in trust, reliability, and scalability—ClickUp 3.0

We shipped fast and often in the early days at ClickUp to deliver the first generation of a platform that would save people time and help them be more productive. We achieved what seemed like the impossible—adding new features every week to respond to our user’s needs.

To support our initial scale, we introduced ClickUp 2.0 in 2020, which was a giant leap forward for our infrastructure and platform. It was a reinvention of what users had come to love with added horsepower. That investment in a new platform opened the door for the growth we have seen over the past two years.

We’ve now grown to support more than 800,000 teams and millions of workspaces worldwide.

It’s time again to make a massive leap forward with our platform architecture by introducing the 3.0 version of our platform. This year will be our largest investment to date in our infrastructure.

ClickUp will soon be able to move even faster, supporting more users and even larger customers.

We’ve been investing internally in this initiative for months. Since our Series C funding announcement in October, we’ve hired over 150 engineers.

Redesigning our architecture for infinite scale and speed is our top priority and we have a dedicated team whose mission is to ensure ClickUp’s architecture is robust and reliable enough to support all our users as we scale. Every engineer at ClickUp is part of this effort.

Here are some of the core benefits you can expect from the next version of ClickUp’s platform:

No single issue, bug, user, or workspace will be able to affect the performance of our entire platform. By investing in a service-oriented architecture, every feature will be able to run independently in our infrastructure. Our re-platforming strategy will be a huge milestone that will help us build faster and ensure platform stability into the future
Our code will be more efficient and highly scalable. We’re re-architecting our code to be more in line with modern cloud applications by separating our data storage from our business logic
Incredible speed and responsiveness. Our current model of data replication takes too much overhead and causes unnecessary problems. We will focus on housing data where our customers are, a strategy that more closely matches industry standards

We’re committed to creating the most powerful, delightful, and reliable productivity platform for all teams. We’re beyond thankful that you are with us on this journey as we transform the way teams work together.