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:

February 15, 2026, from 4:39 AM until 4:57 AM.

February 15, 2026, from 7:00 AM until 7:24 AM.

February 15, 2026, from 9:25 AM until 10:07 AM.

February 15, 2026, from 12:04 PM until 3:29 PM.

During this time frame there was a service disruption.

Root Cause Analysis

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

The service disruption was caused by an unexpected connectivity failure at the Data Center level, stemming from instability on our primary ISP line. While the system initially appeared to self-recover, subsequent intermittent failures led our team to investigate the load balancer infrastructure; however, after performing a reboot and a failover of the load balancer without success, we identified the ISP as the source of the intermittent contention. We successfully mitigated the issue and restored full service by executing a manual failover to our secondary ISP provider.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

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

• Engaging directly with our ISP vendor to conduct a deep-dive analysis into the line failure and ensure the underlying circuit issues are fully resolved.
•  Reviewing and updating our internal monitoring protocols to ensure that ISP-level alerts are immediately surfaced and prioritized to reduce detection time.
•  Analyzing the impact of ISP instability on our load balancing layer to improve how our systems automatically respond to external network fluctuations.
•  Streamlining the failover process between ISP providers to ensure a more rapid transition during primary line degradation.

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.