Is Blackboard down?

With the release of Blackboard SaaS 4000.8 to production last week, there was a change that inadvertently may have caused some links to become corrupted. In a specific scenario where a document included PDF attachments from more than one course, an attachment from a different course may no longer be referenced correctly. In some cases, the document may display an incorrect PDF or an attachment may not open as expected. Note: This can happen with any file types that are cross-referenced too (not just PDFs) The team is currently investigating to identify impacted or affected links and is working to determine a fix.

The team understands the issue and problems caused. They are investigating the path forward to provide a fix to clean up any corrupted links. Additional information will be provided as it becomes available.

We have confirmed the root cause related to the recent 4000.8 release and have already implemented a fix to prevent any new link corruption from occurring. Our current focus is remediation of impacted content. The team is taking a structured recovery approach that includes: - Preserving all relevant system data to ensure no additional information is lost during cleanup - Identifying the specific courses and content items affected - Creating secure backups of impacted content records - Comparing current content with archived versions to accurately restore file references where we have full confidence in the correction - Flagging any items requiring additional validation for follow-up review Several of these remediation steps are being executed in parallel to accelerate resolution. We will provide further updates as restoration progresses and will share additional guidance if client action becomes necessary. At this time, no action is required from clients.

The team continues to make progress on identifying the full set of impacted courses and content items. Once complete we will be able to begin restoration. A timeline for affected file restorations will be shared once it's available.

We are continuing to work through identifying the full set of impacted courses and content items and determining next steps for restoration. Another update will be provided early next week.

The team is currently working on the solution for this issue and hope to have an estimate of the timeline for delivery of the fixes by the end of this week.

Development of the solution to resolve this issue is still underway and preliminary testing has started. We are tentatively targeting a release of the fix by the end of next week. Additional updates will be provided next week.

Contingent on successful testing, the fix to restore the broken file references is expected to be released with the 4000.10 release to Production environments scheduled for Thursday, March 5th.

Testing of the fixes for the broken links is underway. To ensure a successful fix, we have decided to conduct additional rounds of testing, therefore the broken link fix will not be included in this week’s Production release. We will confirm and share a new timeline for release in the next few days. Thank you for your continued patience.

The fix is in the final testing phase. We will provide timing for deployment of the fix early next week.

A fix has been implemented for this issue and it will be deployed with the Blackboard SaaS 4000.10 maintenance release to production this week on March 19th.

The broken links fix will be deployed with the Thursday, March 19, 4000.10.0 maintenance release. While this is expected to resolve the majority of broken links there is one unique scenario that cannot be corrected. When an embedded file has the same filename and extension as another embedded file in the same document, we are unable to determine which backup file it originally corresponded to, and therefore the link cannot be corrected. After the release, organizations will be provided with a list of unresolved file references (if applicable).

We are aware that some of the broken links were not resolved last week after deploying the fix. We are currently investigating the impact in order to determine next steps.

We are currently finalizing the set of changes designed to address the broken link issues reported by users. Several preventative fixes are scheduled to be released in the next two weeks. Separately, we are finishing up changes to automatically repair broken links in many scenarios and will communicate a date for that once it's ready. We recognize that a number of edge cases require thorough handling and will continue to monitor for any related issues. Please continue to submit support tickets if you encounter broken file references so we can investigate promptly. Thank you for your continued patience and partnership.

As part of today’s production maintenance release, we deployed a fix to automatically resolve issues with corrupted attachment links in Ultra courses. This addresses scenarios where attachments either appeared missing/blank despite the file existing, or were linked using invalid system paths or malformed URLs that prevented files from loading. The repair has been applied across affected course content, assessments, and announcements to restore reliable access to attachments. We will continue to monitor for broken file reference edge cases and address them if they arise.