2026-02-03: Foundational Flows do not cascade correctly in very large top-level groups

Foundational Flows do not cascade correctly in very large top-level groups (Severity 3)

Problem: Activating Foundational Flows on very large groups could time out, preventing settings from being applied across all projects. Manual workarounds were restricted by permissions. Newly created or imported projects did not automatically receive the correct flows until a recent fix.

Impact: Previously, large groups such as Learn Labs, Carrefour (over 21,000 projects), and T-Mobile (78,000 projects) could not activate Foundational Flows for all their projects. Users in subgroups without top-level access could not use manual workarounds. Newly created or imported projects in these groups did not receive Foundational Flows automatically until this week, but this has now been fixed and verified in production. Only Code Review and Developer flows are critical for Carrefour, and both are now enabled. Customers experienced a separate CI job out-of-memory failure, but this is unrelated to Foundational Flows.

Causes: The cascading process for Foundational Flows in very large groups could time out, resulting in some projects not being updated. Permission requirements also blocked manual workarounds for many users. For new projects or imports, a separate bug prevented automatic application of flows until the latest fix was deployed.

Response strategy: We released a permissions fix so subgroup and project members can add Foundational Flows, resolving access issues. Batch processing optimization for cascading flows has been rolled out and confirmed working in production for groups with up to 78,000 projects. The fix for new projects not receiving flows automatically has been deployed and verified in Learn Labs and gitlab-da. Customers can now add flows at the project level as needed, and full automation is restored for all cases.

This ticket was created to track INC-7043, by incident.io 🔥