Posts Tagged ‘Incident Report’

In the very late hours (UTC) of 2023-09-18 Some users experienced that they could not receive mails, or do administrative activities – like making payments or creating new users. When they tried they were given an error message: ‘Internal Server error’. This lasted until the morning (UTC) of 2023-09-19.

The issue was caused by the in-memory data store (Redis) going out of memory.

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Welcome back!

We were finally able to bring our blog back. During the past 2 weeks we had a long lasting incident. We did what we could to make sure that users could use their primary services during our work on the systems, but we know that there was unplanned downtime. As the blog was a victim of the situation, we couldn’t inform users as well as we wanted (we really do not like X (‘formerly known as Twitter’)), so here is finally the incident report from the beginning to the end.

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On Friday March 3rd, 2023, from approximately 01:00 UTC to approximately 14:40 UTC, numerous users of our service experienced a variety of issues.

A complete listing of the symptoms experienced is infeasible at this time, but logins will have failed to the web-client interface, the cockpit interface, and people will have not received emails in time.

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On Monday June 06 2022, from approximately 11:24 UTC a group of Kolab Now users observed an error stating: “Gateway time-out” when trying to login to the webclient, the dashboard, or connect with any desktop or mobile client. The Kolab Now main page https://kolabnow.com/ and all other services (Support, blog and knowledge base) were available with no issues for these same users.

The issue lasted for about an hour, until approximately 12:19 UTC, and was caused by a db server in one of the clusters being stuck in a large operation. The issue caused troubles with the login procedure, but had no impact on the mail flow. No mail was lost or delayed during the incident.

The operations team was warned by the monitoring system about a stuck db server in the cluster, and was having hands on keyboards right away. The issue lasted for about an hour (some users in the group saw return of service earlier than others), and was caused by this db server in the cluster being stuck in a large operation.

Further investigation and action is going into reevaluating the amount of resources assigned to the db clusters and other servers for such large operations of this type.

If you were among the group of users that was impacted by this, then please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

On Friday January 21 at 15:48 UTC  users observed that the main page https://kolabnow.com/ became unaccessible and reviled an error: 503 – Server unavailable. The webclient (https://kolabnow.com/apps) was still available, but with seriously degraded performance – to the point where the service would give up and reveal the ‘Maintenance’ page.

Also IMAP, SMTP, ActiveSync, and $DAV was impacted by the failing frontends.

The service was unavailable for about 50 minutes, during which time all mails, in and out, were queued. When the service again was available, those mail queues first had to be delivered before new mail could be sent or received. This caused users to experience a delay in the traffic.

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On Monday morning at 03:22 CET the kolab Now $DAV services stopped working.

While resolving a performance issue for $DAV connections, we moved around  servers from an old infrastructure to a new infrastructure, and with that the rotation of logs. Unfortunately a tiny bit were missed while configuring the new servers, which caused the log rotation attempting to reload httpd (while that wasn’t needed). In turn, reloading httpd didn’t succeed and timed out, and the new DAV servers were left in a maintenance state;  unavailable.

This happened at ~ 03:22 CET. As these are new DAV servers, they were only included in the standard monitoring, and no one got notified about the problem until it was discovered at 07:47 CET. The configuration was promptly corrected and the new DAV servers came back online right away (and was added to the monitoring notifications). At this time everything should be available and working as expected.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused.

On Tuesday 2021-10-05, between 10:20 UTC and 10:40 UTC, a network issue kicked our firewalls off the grid, and Kolab Now was down. Our Operations team was on the case right away and could correct the issue instantly. As a result the downtime was very limited.

When the dust had settled, it turned out that one of our hypervisors had stopped one of its redundant storage blocks, as it was unavailable for too long, and a group ~ 20 users were unable to see their mails in the mail folders. Again our Operations team was reacting fast and could restore the connections to the redundant storage. Everything is back up and running for everyone now, and no data was in danger at any point through out the incident.

If you are one of the few users who had the problem after the down time, or if you experienced troubles during the outage around lunch time, then we truly apologize for the inconvenience that it caused.

If you have any questions or concerns in this context, please contact support.

On Monday, August 23rd 2021 at around 04:00 UTC, Kolab Now suffered a catastrophic outage related to its storage. This post will outline what happened, when it happened, and what is to happen.

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