'Tis the season: Box gifts customers an early weekend with Friday outage

Collaboration tools provider Box saw several of its key services go down Friday just as many of its customers were either starting or wrapping up their workdays.

The issues affected the All Files tool, the Box API, and user logins as well as the upload and download features. As a result, many users were left unable to share files over the service, while others simply could not log in to their accounts.

Box classified the issue, which ran from 06:30 to roughly 09:45 US Pacific time, as a 'major' outage event. The company has confirmed that it has since remedied the issue and by mid-day Pacific time all services had returned to normal.

"Box Services continue to show rapid improvement, but users may experience some latency as services continue to restore back to full functionality," Box said in an update posted at 10:25 local time.

"We are continuing to monitor for any additional impact."

According to Box, the outage began when users began to report receiving timeouts and error notifications when attempting to login or share files. An investigation would later reveal that issue stretched across multiple Box tools and services, including the API calls.

The outages would continue for roughly three more hours before Box reported that it had remedied the issues and performance was improving across all services.

Even then, however, the recovery was slow going and many users found that their Box services were not fully back online and at full speed.

The Stack has asked Box for further details as to the cause of the outage, but at the time of publication has yet to hear back.

While the timing of the outage meant little disruption for companies in Silicon Valley and the West Coast, it was a different story back east, where those on the other coast were hit through the morning work hours.

Over on Reddit, multiple users were reporting problems accessing Box accounts and services throughout the ordeal, with some even noting that the outage was having a major impact on their ability to get work done.

"Our entire document management backbone is Box, a lot of Analysts unable to do anything cause of this," wrote a user with the handle 9Hero.

"Good thing it's Friday so no one is losing their minds…yet."

The timing was particularly bad for workers in the UK and Europe, where many were hoping to wrap up work early and get a head start on the weekend and in many cases an extended holiday over the Christmas period. Hopefully some were able to use the outage to call the day short and head out for a well-deserved pint.