[Medium] Issues with Search service, Box Sign Templates and Metadata queries

Final update

We recently addressed an issue that affected Box Search and related Query functionality, including the Public APIs and Box Apps features that rely on them. We would like to take the opportunity to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to prevent it from happening again. On July 7, 2026 between 06:22 AM and 08:53 AM PT, some customers may have experienced elevated latencies and intermittent errors when using the Box Search and Query functionality. Public APIs for these features, Box Apps, Web App Search, and other functionalities that depends on Search and Query APIs were also impacted. This incident was caused by a sudden surge in indexing traffic that overwhelmed services in one of our subsystems, before they could be scaled up or rate limiting could kick in. We were able to remediate the issue by isolating the offending traffic and allowing the surge of indexing work to finish processing and drain. Regular traffic routing was restored once the affected infrastructure was healthy again. # **Analysis** This incident revealed an opportunity to improve how we protect our search indexing subsystem from sudden~~,~~ and concentrated surges of load. While our stateless servic

1. Postmortem · Jul 31, 21:02 UTC
   We recently addressed an issue that affected Box Search and related Query functionality, including the Public APIs and Box Apps features that rely on them. We would like to take the opportunity to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to prevent it from happening again. On July 7, 2026 between 06:22 AM and 08:53 AM PT, some customers may have experienced elevated latencies and intermittent errors when using the Box Search and Query functionality. Public APIs for these features, Box Apps, Web App Search, and other functionalities that depends on Search and Query APIs were also impacted. This incident was caused by a sudden surge in indexing traffic that overwhelmed services in one of our subsystems, before they could be scaled up or rate limiting could kick in. We were able to remediate the issue by isolating the offending traffic and allowing the surge of indexing work to finish processing and drain. Regular traffic routing was restored once the affected infrastructure was healthy again. # **Analysis** This incident revealed an opportunity to improve how we protect our search indexing subsystem from sudden~~,~~ and concentrated surges of load. While our stateless services can quickly autoscale horizontally, our stateful systems cannot be scaled as quickly to handle sudden surges in load. We’ve historically focused on query traffic driven load and over-provisioned to handle any increases in internally generated indexing load. This incident revealed that sudden and
2. Resolved · Jul 7, 16:19 UTC
   After further monitoring, this incident is now considered resolved. Search service, Box Sign Templates and Metadata queries have been restored to full functionality. If you continue to experience any issues, please contact Box Support at https://support.box.com.
3. Monitoring · Jul 7, 16:12 UTC
   Our team has taken steps to remediate this issue and is seeing improvement for the Search service, Box Sign Templates and Metadata queries. We are continuing to monitor for any additional impact.
4. Identified · Jul 7, 16:01 UTC
   Our team continues remediation efforts to restore full functionality to the Search service, Box Sign Templates and Metadata queries. We will provide additional updates as they become available.
5. Identified · Jul 7, 15:07 UTC
   Our team has identified the underlying cause of this issue and is working to take remediating steps. We will provide additional updates as they become available.
6. Investigating · Jul 7, 14:42 UTC
   Our team is investigating an issue with the Search service, Box Sign Templates and Metadata queries. Users may see errors or slowness when attempting to search items in Box and / or using Metadata queries. We will provide additional information as it becomes available.
7. Investigating · Jul 7, 14:11 UTC
   Our team is investigating an issue with the Search service and Metadata queries. Users may see errors or slowness when attempting to search items in Box and / or using Metadata queries. We will provide additional information as it becomes available.