We recently addressed issues affecting Box. 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 February 1st between 3:03 pm and 4:14 pm PT, some users may have experienced difficulties while working in Box. During this time, the Box Sign user interface may not have been accessible for some users and signed documents may have been processed with a delay. 

Analysis 

On February 1st networking and firewall changes were made in our ongoing effort to improve performance and stability. Due to this change our services were unable to reach out to an external service required for digitally signing documents. 

Our deployment/QA process did not test each individual external endpoint, and so this issue was not identified in the deployment/QA process. In addition, some alarms were misconfigured that would have reduced service degradation.  We were able to resolve the issue by whitelisting this external endpoint. 

Corrective Actions

The following corrective actions have been completed or are planned:

• Improvements to our deployment/QA processes to test each individual endpoint for infrastructure changes. 

• Reconfiguration of alarms and improvements to observability with more granular alarms.

• Improvements to our replay process that can restart failed tasks to mitigate consequences should other issues resulting in failed task occur in the future.

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