Articulate Outage History

#### Overview On 2026-04-21 between approximately 01:45–03:15 ET \(05:45–07:15 UTC\), Articulate 360 Desktop app users experienced authentication failures preventing access to the Articulate 360 Desktop application. The issue was caused by an infrastructure-level change that corrupted a signing key used in the authentication flow. The problem was identified and resolved within approximately 90 minutes. Web-based users were not affected. #### Incident Details and Timeline of Events **Impact:** * Articulate 360 Desktop app users were unable to complete authentication checks, blocking access to the desktop application * Web-based users were not impacted * Duration: approximately 90 minutes **Timeline:** * **2026-04-21 ~01:45 ET \(05:45 UTC\)** — Articulate 360 Desktop app users begin experiencing authentication failures. * **2026-04-21 ~02:00 ET \(06:00 UTC\)** — Issue identified by our engineering team and investigation underway. * **2026-04-21 ~03:15 ET \(07:15 UTC\)** — Fix applied and service fully restored for all affected users. #### What We're Improving * Adding safeguards so that misconfigured authentication credentials are detected at startup and prevent a service from going live, rather than causing silent failures for users * Strengthening our review process for changes to shared infrastructure components to ensure their impact across all services is evaluated before merging

**Overview** On February 24–26, 2026, some Vimeo videos embedded in Rise 360 courses did not display correctly. Instead, affected videos showed a black screen while audio continued to play. This behavior occurred in both the Rise 360 authoring environment \(including preview\) and in previously published courses viewed by learners in learning management systems \(LMSs\). The issue was traced to a change in the behavior of a third-party embed rendering provider used by Rise 360 to process multimedia embeds. This provider rendered Vimeo content in a way that disrupted the video player integration, causing the video to not display while the audio continued to play. A workaround was released that allowed Vimeo embeds to bypass the third-party rendering provider. After the provider implemented a fix and cleared their cache, normal playback behavior was restored. **Incident Details and Timeline of Events** **February 24, 2026** * **22:40 UTC** – Reports were received that Vimeo embeds in Rise displayed a black video frame while audio continued to play. The behavior was reproduced in both authoring/preview and already-published course output. * **22:50 UTC** – An internal incident triage channel was created to coordinate investigation and response. **February 25, 2026** * **13:30 UTC** – A support request was submitted to the third-party embed rendering provider used by Rise for embedded multimedia. * **15:18 UTC** – The incident was escalated to SEV2. * **15:55 UTC** – Public status communication was updated to indicate the issue had been identified and service was degraded. * **17:30 UTC** – Additional attempts were made to reach the provider through multiple contact channels. * **21:36 UTC** – A workaround was released that bypassed the embed rendering provider for Vimeo embeds. This workaround required affected courses to be republished and was deployed behind a feature flag. **February 26, 2026** * **01:31 UTC** The workaround feature flag was enabled for all customers, and guidance on the workaround was shared with customers. * **01:57 UTC** – Incident status was updated to monitoring. * **18:50 UTC** – Direct contact was established with a member of the provider’s team. * **19:39 UTC** – The provider began investigating the issue. * **21:22 UTC** – The provider reported the issue resolved. * **21:53 UTC** – The provider invalidated their CDN cache, and recovery was confirmed. * **22:23 UTC** – Community communications were updated to indicate the issue had been resolved. * **22:35 UTC** – Incident status was updated to resolved. **February 27, 2026** * **15:30 UTC** – The temporary workaround was reverted and the standard integration path between Rise, the embed provider, and Vimeo was restored. ### **Technical Context** Rise 360 uses a third-party service to process and render embedded multimedia links. During the incident, the provider used a corrupted video player, which interfered with the embedded Vimeo videos. This behavior interfered with the video player integration used to control playback, causing video frames to fail to render while audio continued to play. Because the embed rendering occurs at runtime through the provider, the behavior affected both newly authored content and previously published Rise 360 courses. **What We’re Improving** Following the incident, several improvements were identified to reduce the likelihood or impact of similar situations: * **Reducing external runtime dependencies:** Evaluating changes to ensure that published Rise courses rely primarily on Articulate-controlled infrastructure unless authors explicitly opt into third-party services. * **Embed rendering architecture:** Assessing approaches for handling embedded media that reduce dependency on external embed processing services. * **Contingency paths for media embeds:** Implementing mechanisms that allow embedded media to bypass intermediary services when needed, enabling faster mitigation if provider behavior changes. * **Operational readiness for third-party services:** Ensuring service credentials, account access, and escalation contacts for external providers are maintained and readily accessible to support faster incident coordination. These efforts are intended to strengthen resilience around embedded media playback and improve response flexibility when third-party services change behavior.

Between January 31 23:30 UTC and February 1 1:30 UTC, we experienced an issue with our load balancing systems in Rise and Reach 360. During this time, users may have experienced occasional errors in loading pages or completing actions, sometimes requiring a retry.