The 1-Second Blunder: How Vercel Edge Function Timeout Crashed Global APIs

A misconfigured timeout setting on Vercel Edge Functions—reduced from 10 seconds to 1 second—triggered a complete 30-minute outage affecting all global API services, impacting over 12,000 user requests. The incident demonstrates how minor configuration errors can cascade into critical infrastructure failures and underscores the importance of pre-deployment validation, performance baselines, and staged rollouts in edge computing environments.