Blackboard experienced a notice incident on August 31, 2026 affecting Ally - Canada and Ally - Asia Pacific and 1 more component, lasting 14d 12h. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- investigating Aug 31, 2026, 12:18 PM UTC
We are investigating a potential issue with Ally's underlying OCR (Optical Character Recognition) process that is causing an increased number of failures when attempting to OCR a scanned PDF in both the Instructor Feedback and Alternative Formats. These features remain available and the issue appears to be intermittent and not impacting every scanned PDF at this time. We are investigating with our OCR provider to determine the root cause.
- monitoring Sep 08, 2026, 07:02 PM UTC
While we have seen failure rates decrease over the last week we continue to monitor this with our OCR provider to determine any additional next steps.
- resolved Sep 15, 2026, 12:27 AM UTC
OCR Processing has remained within expected levels. Analysis shows the potential cause of the initial issue as an error during the final export step when converting to OCR PDF. The Ally team continues to work with our OCR provider to determine potential improvements to this process.