Articulate 360 Services: Intermittent Performance Issues (March 13-24, 2025)
On March 13th, 2025 at approximately 12:00 PM PST, customers experienced intermittent issues with Articulate 360 services due to a memory issue on one of our core backend services. Performance stabilized on March 21st, 2025 at 2:00 PM PST. We are committed to ensuring that all of our products are available so that you have what you need, when you need it. After a detailed analysis, we're now sharing what happened, how we responded, and the steps we've taken to improve our systems and processes going forward.
Incident Details
On March 13th, customers experienced intermittent performance issues and errors with Articulate 360 Services. The incident lasted for 11 days, with services fully restored on March 24, 2025 at 12:00 PM PST.
Impact:
- Some customers reported trouble using Review 360 Share links
- Difficulty accessing desktop tools
- Issues staying logged into web-hosted tools
- Services would return to normal for significant periods of time and then experience problems during isolated windows
Timeline:
- March 13, 12:00 PM PST: Initial reports of intermittent performance issues
- March 13: Identified apparent memory leak; reverted a system change made earlier in the day
- March 14-16: Services appeared functional for many hours; upgraded third-party monitoring tool to collect more information
- March 17: Made an update to solve a secondary memory leak; symptoms returned after 4-5 hours
- March 20: Discovered the monitoring tool had its own memory leak; attempted to reverse the upgrade
- March 21, 2:00 PM PST: Identified our mistake and correctly downgraded the monitoring tool, stopping the final leak
- March 21-24: Continued monitoring for any issues over the weekend
- March 24, 12:00 PM PST: Confirmed normal performance and resolved the incident
Root Cause
Our investigation revealed two separate memory leaks affecting our systems:
- An initial memory leak that we incorrectly attributed to a system change made on March 13
- A second memory leak inadvertently introduced when we upgraded our third-party monitoring tool to collect more diagnostic information
These memory leaks caused our systems to hit memory limits, resulting in the intermittent performance issues experienced by [some] customers.
Actions Taken
As a result of this incident, we have identified the following actions:
- Make an architecture change that eliminates extended downtime when making required changes to database clusters.
- Adjust our monitoring thresholds to accommodate faster speeds of these services.
- Work with our third-party vendor to prevent similar issues in the future.
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.