Root Cause Analysis: Vidal Platform Access Issues from East US Locations
Summary
On September 1, 2026, between 10:00 UTC and 12:35 UTC, some customers accessing the Vidal platform from East US locations were unable to access the service. The issue was detected at 10:00 UTC following customer reports and internal observations. Service accessibility was restored after the affected cached content was invalidated.
Root Cause
The issue occurred during a platform deployment when requests were temporarily distributed between the previous and newly deployed application versions. Under certain conditions, the application attempted to retrieve a web asset that was not available in the version handling the request. The resulting response was then stored in cache, preventing affected users from successfully loading the Vidal platform.
Incident Timeline
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Identified: September 1, 2026, at 10:00 UTC
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Public notification: September 1, 2026, at 11:37 UTC
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Resolved: September 1, 2026, at 12:35 UTC
Preventative Measures
To reduce the likelihood and impact of similar incidents in the future, we are taking the following steps:
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Enhancements to Application Response Handling: We have updated the application to return an appropriate response when a requested web asset is unavailable, preventing an incorrect response from being cached. This corrective change has been completed.
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Enhancements to Cache Management: We have refined our current process on how unavailable application assets are handled so that missing content is not stored in the cache and subsequently returned to users.
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Enhancements to Post-Deployment Validation: Further strengthen our current post-deployment validation to verify platform accessibility from multiple network paths and locations immediately following a deployment.
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Enhancements to Monitoring and Alerting: Expand the existing monitoring to identify platform accessibility issues quicker.
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Enhancements to Incident Response: Enhance current documentation to include additional relevant post-deployment symptoms, potential causes, and validated remediation steps to support faster diagnosis and recovery if similar behavior is observed.