Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the service interruption experienced by Clarivate customers.
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 Clarivate is taking to avoid similar cases in future.

Affected Products  

HEP EU00, EU01 and EU02

Event Timeline

Service degradation was experienced by Alma customers served by the EU00, EU01 and EU02 instances at the Amsterdam Data Center during the following dates and hours, Amsterdam time:

July 13, 2026, from 11:40 AM until 07:04 PM.

July 14, 2026, from 07:59 AM until 02:17 PM.

During the first event, the service was inaccessible for 1 hour and 46 minutes. During the second event, the majority of customers saw services restored within 1 hour and 31 minutes (by 09:30 AM), while a smaller subset of traffic continued to experience intermittent login failures and slow load times that were progressively resolved through 02:17 PM.

Root Cause Analysis

Clarivate engineers investigated the incident and identified the following root cause:

During both events, customers experienced difficulty accessing Alma, slow logins, and periods of degraded performance. Our investigation, conducted in coordination with our Internet Service Provider (ISP), confirmed that the disruption originated on the ISP side — specifically, a hardware failure on a network card at one of their network sites, which caused performance degradation on the link serving the DC03/Amsterdam data center.

During the initial troubleshooting on July 13, an attempted failover of a network infrastructure component did not complete cleanly, which temporarily escalated the performance issue into a full service outage; service was fully restored following an on-site physical restart of the affected component by our data center partners, after which the situation returned from an outage state to performance degradation. Traffic was subsequently redirected to an alternate ISP, and remaining network routes still following the degraded path were progressively transitioned over, fully restoring service. The failed hardware on the ISP side has since been replaced.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• We are tuning our monitoring for the DC03/Amsterdam data center — including external availability alerts and internal VPN tunnel alerts — to improve early detection and better align monitoring with the customer experience.

• We are reviewing our load balancer failover procedures to ensure recovery actions execute cleanly without introducing secondary impact.

• We are refining our ISP failover workflows so traffic can be redirected more quickly and completely when a network path degrades.

• We are working with our ISP partners to secure long-term stability of the impacted network paths; the underlying hardware fault has already been replaced.

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.