Box incident
[Medium] Issues with Search service, Box Sign Templates and Metadata queries
Box experienced a major incident on July 7, 2026 affecting Search and Search and 1 more component, lasting 2h 8m. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- investigating Jul 07, 2026, 02:11 PM 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.
- investigating Jul 07, 2026, 02:42 PM 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.
- identified Jul 07, 2026, 03:07 PM 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.
- identified Jul 07, 2026, 04:01 PM 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.
- monitoring Jul 07, 2026, 04:12 PM 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.
- resolved Jul 07, 2026, 04:19 PM 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.
- postmortem Jul 31, 2026, 09:02 PM 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 large indexing surges can impact stability more than we anticipated. Our safeguards did not sufficiently slow or throttle a large burst of re-indexing traffic, and a temporary configuration change in place at the time of this incident caused files to be re-indexed in full even when only non-content attributes had changed, amplifying the load. # **Corrective Actions** Box has initiated the following corrective actions: * Add per source rate limiting to the indexing pipeline so a large burst of work cannot overwhelm the subsystem. * Optimize indexing load, so files are only re-indexed when their content has actually changed. * Set safer limits on how much work the pipeline will accept at once. * Improve monitoring and alerting to detect unusual spikes in processing earlier and respond before customers are impacted. We are continuously working to improve Box and want to make sure we are delivering the best product and user experience we can. We hope this provides clarity on what occurred and the steps we are taking. We would be happy to answer any questions you may still have regarding this matter. Sincerely, The Box Team