[Major] Issue with File Request Feature

We recently addressed issues affecting File Request. 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 21:30 and 23:00 PT on Wednesday, August 9th 2023, some users may have experienced difficulties while working in Box. During this time users may have been unable to view or edit File Request settings, to create new File Request links, or to view the File Request view page. The issue occurred as a result of a recent configuration adjustment made to enhance service availability and reliability. We were able to resolve the issue by augmenting resources to the impacted workloads. In addition, we are instituting regular capacity audits and reassessing the setup of analogous services to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future. 

Analysis

Our investigations pinpointed the issue to our service migration to a new environment. An unintended under-provisioning in server deployment occurred, influenced by the specific environment and the scaling tools in use. This provisioning discrepancy rendered the service vulnerable to traffic spikes. With existing scaling metric challenges, this led to resource depletion and subsequent service disruptions.

Corrective Actions

The following corrective actions have been completed or are planned:

• Conduct a thorough capacity review for all recently migrated services.
• Proactively increase resource allocation for similar services.
• Refine our scaling strategies to better accommodate traffic fluctuations.
• Augment our alerting and monitoring systems for quicker issue detection and resolution.

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