Summary of impact:

At approximately 07:10 UTC on Wednesday 25th January 2023, services in our Asia Pacific region (R3) became unreachable due to a Microsoft Azure network outage. Services were fully restored at approximately 09:30 UTC.

Customers using our R3 environment may have experienced some of the following issues:

• Intermittent access to their Dotdigital account and API
• Delayed or failed Segment refreshes. This may have had the knock-on impact of preventing some campaign sends.

Customers in our Europe (R1) and North America (R2) regions may have noticed brief periods where accessing Dotdigital was not possible or it was slow to load.

Root Cause:

Dotdigital depends upon the Microsoft Azure cloud which suffered a global network outage impacting all Azure regions. In a preliminary RCA, Microsoft declared a change made to their Wide Area Network (WAN) impacted connectivity between clients on the internet and Azure.

Mitigation:

Microsoft reverted a recent configuration change to their Wide Area Network which allowed us to restore normal service at approximately 09:30 UTC.

Next Steps:

Microsoft are a key technology partner, and we rely upon their cloud infrastructure to host our platform. We make use of many high availability features provided by Azure, but none are able to cope with a global Azure network outage. We’ll work with our partners at Microsoft to better understand the root cause of this outage and the steps being taken to prevent future occurrences.