[Critical] Issues with Multiple Box Services

Final update

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 January 7th, 2026 between 5:10 PM and 5:50 PM PST, some customers experienced elevated errors and timeouts across multiple Box experiences, including Login, Uploads/Downloads, Box Notes, and the Public API. These issues were caused by a series of changes that triggered a request storm that overloaded our caching fleet. We resolved this by initially rate limiting background traffic and then rolling back the changes. ‌ **Analysis** On January 6th, a new feature was deployed that increased the utilization of one of our cache backends. That feature, in isolation, did not cause any problem. On January 7th, at 3:30 PM PST, another application change was rolled out that increased the traffic on the same system. Combined, these two changes significantly decreased our capacity buffer on some of our cache systems. ‌ On January 7th at 5:00 PM PT, another unrelated application change was released which created a short traffic spike in the cache system. This spike would have been handled without problems in

1. Postmortem · Jan 8, 23:59 UTC
   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 January 7th, 2026 between 5:10 PM and 5:50 PM PST, some customers experienced elevated errors and timeouts across multiple Box experiences, including Login, Uploads/Downloads, Box Notes, and the Public API. These issues were caused by a series of changes that triggered a request storm that overloaded our caching fleet. We resolved this by initially rate limiting background traffic and then rolling back the changes. ‌ **Analysis** On January 6th, a new feature was deployed that increased the utilization of one of our cache backends. That feature, in isolation, did not cause any problem. On January 7th, at 3:30 PM PST, another application change was rolled out that increased the traffic on the same system. Combined, these two changes significantly decreased our capacity buffer on some of our cache systems. ‌ On January 7th at 5:00 PM PT, another unrelated application change was released which created a short traffic spike in the cache system. This spike would have been handled without problems in a normal situation, but the reduced capacity buffer in our cache system created some temporary slowness and retries. Unfortunately, one critical code path that had been migrated to a newer infrastructure had a more aggressive retry policy than the old one. As a result, a retry storm increased the t
2. Resolved · Jan 8, 02:37 UTC
   After further monitoring, this incident is now considered resolved. Our teams have validated that all affected services are restored to full functionality. Please contact Box Support at https://support.box.com/ if you continue to experience any issues.
3. Monitoring · Jan 8, 02:13 UTC
   Our team has taken steps to remediate this issue and is seeing improvement for the impacted services. We are continuing to monitor for any additional impact.
4. Identified · Jan 8, 02:05 UTC
   The problem has been identified, and we are observing a trend towards recovery.
5. Investigating · Jan 8, 01:58 UTC
   We are continuing to investigate this issue.
6. Investigating · Jan 8, 01:39 UTC
   We are investigating an ongoing issue affecting Login, Public API, Uploads, Downloads and Box Notes. We will provide more information as soon as it is available.