Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the Alma service interruption experienced by Ex Libris customers on April 2, 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, Chicago time:

April 11, 2026, from 12:14 AM until 2:27 AM.

During the event, the service was inaccessible.

Root Cause Analysis

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

On April 11, all products hosted on DC04 experienced an interruption triggered by planned maintenance from our primary Internet Service Provider. Our systems are built with redundancy to automatically failover to a secondary provider; however, the primary ISP's maintenance protocol kept their foundational network routing signals (BGP session and default route) continuously active despite the underlying loss of connectivity. Because these routing signals never dropped, our network was unable to detect the link as down, which prevented the automatic failover from triggering as designed. To restore service, our network engineering team and on-site data center partners manually disconnected the primary link, successfully forcing all traffic to route through our fully operational secondary ISP.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• The network team working to enhance our ISP failover mechanism to include more checks in order to determine if the line is down and trigger the failover accordingly.

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.