[Major] Some Users May See Errors Accessing The All Files Page

We recently addressed issues affecting availability of the Box All Files page. We would like to take the opportunity to further explain these issues and the steps we have taken to keep them from happening in the future.

Between 5:42 AM PDT and 6:30 AM PDT on October 17th, some users may have experienced difficulties while working in Box. During this time, there was a degradation in availability of the All Files page. The issue occurred due to a bug in our code promotion pipeline, which promoted a disruptive change beyond the canary stage, causing wider impact. We were able to resolve the issue by rolling back the change. In addition, we are working to improve our release strategy and testing processes to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future. 

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Analysis

The code that was promoted beyond the canary stage introduced an unintended change in the behavior of our feature flagging mechanism. The code change was intended to improve application performance by implementing a filtering-based approach. However, the feature flagging system was not yet fully compatible with this implementation, which resulted in a malfunction on the All Files page.

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Corrective Actions

Box has initiated the following corrective actions:

• Strengthened the canary deployment validation criteria in our release strategy.
• Updated internal documentation to reflect feature-flag system dependencies and operational constraints.
• Provided engineers clear guidance for safely integrating changes with the feature-flag system.

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We are continuously working to improve Box and want to make sure we are delivering the best product and user experience we can. We hope we have provided some clarity here and we would be happy to answer any questions you may still have regarding this matter. 

Sincerely,
The Box Team