We recently addressed issues affecting Public API, Downloads, Uploads and Sign. 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.

On July 26, 2023 between 5:30 and 6:20 PM PDT, some users may have experienced difficulties while working in Box. During this time, users may have degraded experience or difficulty accessing Public API, Downloads, Uploads and Sign. The issue occurred due to an outage of an internal secrets management system that failed after a rare spike in requests from other systems. We were able to resolve the issue by restarting the front ends of the secrets management system to shed connections. In addition, we scaled up the capacity for the secrets management system as well as modified internal clients to reduce the magnitude of future spikes to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future.

Analysis

The internal secrets management system’s file descriptor and connection limits had been increased two months before this issue occurred. The increases were intended to improve system performance during anomalous conditions, but the system’s TCP ephemeral port range remained too small. A request spike consumed the available ephemeral ports on the hosts, resulting in the system becoming unavailable.

Corrective Actions

The following corrective actions have been completed or are planned:

• Tuned the system’s limits to prevent the port exhaustion condition from reoccurring
• Improvements made to reduce the recurrence of high magnitude request spikes
• The connection limiting front end is being replaced with an improved load balancer

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