2026-08-17: Project/Group deletions are failing on .com

Project/Group deletions are failing on .com (Severity 2)

Problem: Project and group deletions are failing on GitLab.com.

Impact: Customers can start project or group deletions, but some deletions stayed in Pending deletion and did not complete. This has been confirmed by several GitLab.com customer reports, and the issue has been happening since 5 August 2026 UTC.

Causes: A problematic database foreign key was blocking deletions. The weekend reindex attempt to remove it failed because it could not obtain the required locks. We then retried the migration manually after a wraparound-prevention vacuum cleared.

Response strategy: We successfully ran the migration to remove the blocking foreign key. We are re-enabling deletion workers in a staged rollout so queued deletions can be processed safely: project deletions are at 10% and group deletions will follow after the project rollout completes.

This ticket was created to track INC-13111, by incident.io 🔥