For more information about our Incident Response and Communications please read this support article.
We also maintain a list of Known Product Issues separate from this site here.
[Minor] Customers may be experiencing issues with uploads and downloads
Postmortem
We recently addressed issues affecting Box Zones Germany and Box Zones France. 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 9:04am and 10:32am PDT on March 21, 2025, some Box Zones users in Germany and France may have experienced difficulties while working in Box. During this time, some servers became unresponsive, causing connections to time out for some users in these Box Zones regions. The issue occurred due to a configuration change made as part of a software upgrade, which resulted in some servers losing memory. We were able to resolve the issue by temporarily redirecting some processing activity until the configuration change was fixed. Throughout the duration of the incident, all content continued to be stored in the correct Zones region. We are also implementing additional monitoring and alerting to catch this type of issue sooner to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.
Analysis
The issue occurred due to a configuration change which was made as part of upgrading some software to use the latest Long Term Supported (LTS) version of Java. The change inadvertently resulted in some servers running out of Java heap memory. We were able to resolve the issue by temporarily processing some European customer traffic using servers in the US until the European servers were back to normal. At no time during the issue was content moved or stored in a different region than the appropriate Box Zones region.
Corrective Actions
Box has initiated the following corrective actions:
- Additional monitoring and alerting is being put into place to catch this type of issue sooner to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.
- We are making improvements to reduce the amount of time taken to switch to alternative servers for processing in these and similar issues.
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