React Native 0.71 RC1 Android Outage Postmortem
Article Summary
A single character in a Gradle config file took down Android builds for every React Native version simultaneously. Here's how the React Native team handled a 4-day global outage.
The React Native team published a detailed postmortem of the November 2022 incident where releasing version 0.71 RC0 broke Android builds across all versions. The culprit? A dynamic version operator (+) in build.gradle that caused projects to pull incompatible artifacts from Maven Central.
Key Takeaways
- Dynamic version operator (+) pulled wrong artifacts, breaking all Android builds
- Community found workaround in 2 hours, full resolution took 4 days
- Team patched 9 versions back to 0.63 to cover 90% of users
- Incident exposed gaps in release testing and incident response strategy
- New policies: better testing, release support policy, 3rd party library guidance
Critical Insight
A Gradle antipattern that existed since React Native 0.12.0 finally caused a global outage, prompting major improvements to release infrastructure and incident response.
