Summary of the December 18, 2013 Service Failure Event

We would like to share more details with our customers about our service failure of December 18th. The service disruption began at 03:23:46 PM Eastern when the blade server powering our web app layer failed. This layer is a core infrastructure component of the FolderGrid encryption grid and used to appropriately route and authorize incoming service requests. The ramifications of the hardware failure were immediately recognized and our technical team began work to migrate the web app to a new server.

FolderGrid was designed from the ground up to prioritize reliability over availability and thus reacted to this infrastructure failure by forcing our service offline and ensuring that no customer data would be at risk as the infrastructure was repaired. Unfortunately the repairs required two hours and nineteen minutes during which FolderGrid was globally unavailable. At 05:42:46 PM EDT, the web service layer was fully repaired and service immediately restored.

As an immediate response, we’ve published a service availability page which will better alert our customers to any service disruptions. Over the coming weeks we will also be working to ensure this type of hardware failure will not result in such an extensive outage. We know how critical our services are to our customers’ businesses, and we know this disruption came at an inopportune time for some of our customers. We will do everything we can to learn from this event and use it to drive further improvement to our service.

Sincerely,
The FolderGrid Team

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