Rise 360 and Review 360 are Unavailable for EU Data Center customers

On February 24th 2025, Articulate 360 had an outage in the EU Data Center due to misconfiguration in our platform infrastructure. We are committed to ensuring that all of our data centers are highly available so that you have what you need, when you need it. After a detailed analysis, we're now sharing what went wrong, how we responded, and the steps we've taken to improve our systems and processes going forward.

Summary

On February 24th at 02:13ET, customers were reporting that they were unable to access Rise 360 and Review 360 in the EU Data Center due to a certificate error. Our incident response plan was activated and the on call Product Engineer escalated to the Platform team. We identified the expired certificate and were able to quickly remediate the issue. Once the expired certificate was replaced, the issue was resolved for our customers.

As a result of this incident, the following remediation actions have been identified: we’ll be auditing our infrastructure for potential additional certificate management issues, as well as enhancing our monitoring to prevent future occurrences of this issue. Additional information about lessons learned and next steps are summarized at the end of this report.

Details

This report shares the factors that contributed to the incident, the remediations put in place, as well as lessons learned and go-forward improvements to help prevent similar incidents in the future.

Incident: Monday, February 24th (99 minutes):

From approximately 02:13ET to 03:52ET, Rise 360 and Review 360 were unavailable in the EU Data Center.

• Root Cause:  the downtime in the EU Datacenter was caused by an expired TLS certificate for articulateusercontent.eu.
• Identification:  upon reviewing the ERR_CERT_DATE_INVALID error while loading courses and inspecting the certificate via the browser, it was determined that the certificate for articulateusercontent.eu had expired. The certificate had failed to auto-renew due to a missing DNS validation record, which in turn was caused by a misconfiguration in our infrastructure code.
• Remediation:  We corrected the misconfiguration that led to the missing validation record and ensured that the certificate was re-generated correctly.

Lessons Learned and Next Steps

In response to the incident, we are committed to not only addressing the immediate issues but also implementing robust measures to safeguard against similar events in the future. We’ve identified gaps in our monitoring strategy, as well as the need to audit our existing infrastructure for misconfigurations that could lead to similar issues in the future.

Monitoring Enhancements

• We’ll test and validate that we have certificate validity and expiration monitoring in place for all of our public TLS infrastructure.

Infrastructure Audit

• We’ll validate that configurations related to our public TLS infrastructure are consistent and correct across our platform.

Articulate’s Commitment to Excellence

Every day, you entrust Articulate with the crucial mission of training your customers, employees, and teams—a responsibility we take very seriously and value deeply.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience the recent incident may have caused, impacting the smooth and efficient service we constantly aim to deliver.

We are fully committed to learning from this experience and strengthening our pledge to support your ongoing success and satisfaction.