We also maintain a list of Known Product Issues separate from this site here.
We recently addressed issues affecting admin reports. 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 December 16, 2021 at 9:00 am PT and January 5, 2022 at 8:08 am PT, some users may have experienced difficulties while working in Box. During this time, some admin reports reflecting data about the current state of a Box deployment may have been out of date. Reports on actions taken, such as the User Activity Report, were not affected. The issue occurred due to a faulty maintenance operation that temporarily prevented us from updating the data used to generate the affected reports. We were able to resolve the issue by adjusting the system to be more reliable and handle extra data. In addition, we have revised our maintenance procedures to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.
Analysis
This issue was triggered by a routine maintenance operation that was incorrectly executed. This left the process that provides updated data from our database to the admin reporting feature in an unusual state that our monitoring failed to identify as problematic. Though the available data became increasingly recent as the issue was remediated, it took time to fully recover given the backlog of updates that this issue created.
Corrective Actions
The following corrective actions have been completed:
Hardened monitoring to handle edge cases that can arise during known maintenance procedures and immediately alert if deviations are detected
Tuned the affected process to be resilient in the face large backlogs
Increased capacity to process data well in excess of normal operations
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