Company Blames Outage on "Small Subset of Users," Who Turn Out to Be All Users
The status page reported "degraded performance for some customers" for nine hours while the entire platform was down, which the company says is "technically consistent."
NEW YORK — Collaboration platform Nimbus attributed a nine-hour outage Tuesday to an issue affecting "a small subset of users," a group the company later confirmed comprised its 40 million active accounts, every enterprise customer, and its own engineering team, who could not log in to fix it.
"When we say 'subset,' we mean a set contained within the set of all users," said a Nimbus spokesperson. "The set of all users is contained within itself. So, yes. A subset. We stand by the status page."
The status page, which throughout the incident displayed a yellow icon and the phrase "Some customers may experience degraded performance," was praised internally for accuracy, since customers did experience degraded performance, in the sense that the product did not load. The page was updated hourly with the sentence "Our team continues to investigate," which the company confirmed was true, though the investigation was being conducted over text messages because the team's own workspace was down.
Customers said they found the language frustrating. "I called support and they said the issue was affecting a small number of users," said the IT director of a 6,000-person hospital network. "I asked how small. They said they couldn't share that. I said everyone in my building. They said, 'Yes, that's consistent with what we're seeing.'"
Nimbus said the root cause was a configuration change that "behaved unexpectedly," a phrase that the company's post-mortem template has included since 2019 and that engineers describe as "the noun for what happened."
The company said it would publish a full incident report within five business days, and that the report would describe the impact as "broad but limited," a category it has created for this purpose.