We recently addressed issues affecting uploads and downloads for 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.

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Between February 3, 2023 at 9:09 PM PST and February 4, 2023 at 11:20 AM PST, some users may have experienced difficulties while working in Box. During this time, some users may have experienced failures when attempting to upload or download content to Box. We were able to resolve the issue by deploying additional resources and scaling up our services. In addition, we are working on improving our change management process to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future. 

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_Analysis _

The issue was a result of a change from HTTP metrics communication in the region to HTTPS metrics communication. This change failed and resulted in a communication failure between our metrics agent and the metric sink it writes to. During the communication failure, the metrics agent will locally cache the data up to a max capacity. In our deployments, we did not have enough resources deployed for this cache. The impact was resource exhaustion in a cluster running our upload and download services resulting in frequent service restarts due to an out-of-memory exception

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Corrective Actions

The following corrective actions have been completed or are planned:

• Increased the deployment resources to allow for the additional capacity
• Added specific alerting for this scenario

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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