Twilio experienced a significant 2.5-hour service disruption on February 26, 2021, affecting various products including SMS, Flex, Console, and others, causing increased latency, errors, and delayed launches. The root cause was an overloaded critical service that manages feature-enablement for many Twilio products, which led to multiple product failures. To resolve the issue, Twilio increased server capacity and added additional caching, but acknowledged that their standard procedure didn't fully account for ongoing load. The company is now implementing several improvements to prevent reoccurrence, including reconfiguring auto-scaling behavior, removing critical services from key paths, and refactoring APIs to increase scalability. Additionally, Twilio is reviewing its communication procedures with customers during disruptions and taking steps across their engineering organization to identify similar risk characteristics and remediate them.