We recently addressed issues affecting Box Notes. 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 6:15pm PDT on June 10th and 12:56am PDT on June 11th, some users may have experienced difficulties while working in Box. During this time, Box uploads, downloads and Notes experienced some failures / errors. This issue occurred due to a code change that caused our storage databases to replicate invalid events that impacted the availability of the system. We were able to resolve the issue by restarting our storage database clusters to remove the invalid events from replication and resume normal operation. In addition, we are working towards a fix for the configuration change to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future. 

Analysis

The issue occurred as a result of a recent code change in an ongoing effort to improve the underlying technology that powers Box storage services. Our engineering team prioritized executing these changes on a database cluster that was not in customer path but encountered an unexpected failure that caused invalid events to replicate and overrun our customer-facing databases capacity. The team immediately rolled back the code change but invalid events continued to saturate our storage database clusters. In response, our team took further remediation steps to remove these invalid events and failover our storage service applications to other Box regions. No impact to data occurred as part of this issue or the remediation work to restore service.

Corrective Actions

The following corrective actions have been completed or are planned:

• Document a more expedient recovery procedure for invalid replication events in our storage database clusters.

• Modify our Box Storage improvement plan to reduce the risk of introducing invalid replication events.

• Increase the speed of our Storage Service failover process.

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