Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on Alma CN01.

The goal of this document is to share our findings regarding the event, specify the root cause analysis, outline actions to be taken to solve the downtime event, as well as preventive measures Ex Libris is taking to avoid similar cases in future

Effected Products  

HEP CN01

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the Alma CN01 instance at the Chinese Data Center during the following hours: 

November 30, 2025 from 05:02 PM until 05:37 PM Beijing time

During the event, the service was intermittently experiencing performance issues.

Root Cause Analysis

Ex Libris Engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause analysis with the following results:

During a scheduled optimization aimed at improving the database performance, a configuration change unintentionally locked a single table. While the lock persisted, users experienced slower response times because the affected processes could not access the data. After the operation was halted, the lock cleared, and normal service resumed. 

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

Ex Libris has taken the following action and preventive measures to avoid such an occurrence in future:

• The maintenance procedure has been updated to eliminate manual storage changes and now includes a validation step to prevent table‑locking misconfigurations.

Customer Communication

ExLibris is committed to providing customers with prompt and ongoing updates during Cloud events. Ongoing and prompt updates on service interruptions appear in the system status portal at this address: http://status.exlibrisgroup.com/

These updates are automatically sent as emails to registered customers