Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on March 9, 2025.
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.

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Ex Libris customers served by the HEP NA01, NA02, NA03, NA91  instances during the following hours: 

March 9, 2025, from 10:53 PM until 11:36 PM Chicago time.

During the event, the service was unavailable.

Root Cause Analysis

Ex Libris engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause of this issue and concluded the following:

As part of a planned maintenance activity, which was supposed to have no impact on our service, a misconfiguration occurred at the firewall level. This misconfiguration caused a full data center service disruption.

Upon identifying the misconfiguration, our engineers addressed the issue, successfully restoring the service.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

Processes and procedures were refreshed with the relevant teams to ensure proper handling of maintenance activities.

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.