[Critical] Slowness issue

We recently addressed issues affecting logins, file uploads and downloads. 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 September 29, 2024, between 10:55 PM PDT and 11:33 PM PDT, some users may have experienced difficulties while working in Box. During this time, users may have experienced difficulties in performing login operations and file uploads/downloads. This issue occurred as a result of a recent software change in our ongoing effort to improve performance and stability. We were able to resolve the issue by increasing the scaling of a feature toggle management service. In addition, we are working to improve our release strategy to prevent similar issues from occurring in the future. 

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Analysis

Before the incident, we had identified an issue with autoscaling of our feature toggle management service and prepared a change in four major applications. The change was inadvertently pushed simultaneously across all regions and instances. The simultaneous restarts of the applications caused a temporary slowdown in the affected applications ability to process all of the load in a timely manner resulting increased timeout errors across Box’s products.

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Corrective Actions

Box has initiated the following corrective actions:

• Adjust release strategy for feature toggle management service to ensure a more gradual rollout
• Investigate platform configuration to decrease application start-up time during release rollouts

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