VitalSource incident
Service Disruption Impacting Bookshelf Online
VitalSource experienced a major incident on September 4, 2025 affecting Bookshelf Online and Store, Sampling and Ecommerce Platform and 1 more component, lasting 1h 26m. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- investigating Sep 04, 2025, 11:45 AM UTC
We are investigating an issue impacting Bookshelf Online.
- monitoring Sep 04, 2025, 12:09 PM UTC
Bookshelf is back online, and we are monitoring its impact.
- resolved Sep 04, 2025, 01:12 PM UTC
This incident has been resolved.
- postmortem Sep 04, 2025, 08:10 PM UTC
Bookshelf Online experienced a complete service outage this morning due to processing issues with our Manage API. The incident was triggered when our system encountered difficulties handling a large batch of asset updates. While our platform has successfully processed similar volumes in the past, this particular batch appears to have contained edge cases or problematic assets that degraded our API's processing capability. This degradation cascaded through our system, ultimately rendering Bookshelf completely unavailable to users. Our engineering team quickly identified the contributing factors and implemented emergency mitigation measures, including temporarily blocking the problematic API endpoint. We have conducted an investigation and implemented permanent safeguards, including proper rate limiting for our asset update API and enhanced data validation processes. Our team is also reviewing whether any data reprocessing is needed to ensure complete data integrity. Service is fully operational, and we're implementing measures to prevent similar incidents in the future.