Sonar Platform Outage Update and Resolution: July 11th, 2023

On July 11, 2023, Sonar experienced a platform outage caused by the failure of one of our critical infrastructure hosts, which affected all of Sonar's services for 3 to 4 hours for some accounts. The root cause was a temporary Microsoft Azure outage, and full service was restored the same day after a full startup of our US and Canadian data centers.

On Tuesday, July 11th, 2023 we experienced a platform outage due to failure of one of our critical infrastructure hosts that affected all of Sonar's services. This outage lasted between 3 - 4 hours for some accounts. We are deeply sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. Our team was aware of the outage immediately and made every effort to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

We aim to be as transparent as possible with our users. Below is more detailed information regarding the outage and the impacts it had. We thank you for your patience while we were bringing Sonar back online, and we are working diligently to prevent any outage like this from happening in the future.

If you have any questions about how this might have affected your Sonar instance, please feel free to reach out to us directly at support@sonar.software.

Outage Date and Time by Region

Canada

Tuesday, July 11th 3:22pm CST, resolved on Tuesday, July 11th 7:17pm CST

Total outage time: 3 hrs 55 min

United States

Tuesday, July 11th 3:22pm CST, resolved on Tuesday, July 11th 6:12pm CST

Total outage time: 2 hrs 50 min

Summary of Impact: Azure Infrastructure Failure

Sonar Software utilizes Microsoft Azure as a core infrastructure provider. On July 11th, 2023, Sonar experienced a service outage because Azure's platform became unavailable for a short period of time. This impacted Sonar's platform as well as access to Sonar's support team. When Azure became available again, Sonar had to initiate a full startup process for both the US and Canadian data centers.

Customer Impact: Application, Billing, API, and Netflow

Overall, any usage of the V2 application in both the US and Canada would have been halted while the application was down during that window.

Billing processing during this period was halted, but would have begun to process once the application was brought back online.

Any external requests made to the Sonar API by a custom application would not have been received during the outage period.

Data usage based on Netflow was lost during this period if your Netflow device did not cache or resubmit the data. This data usage is unrecoverable because the endpoint was down during the outage period.

Sonar support was unavailable during the outage period.

Mitigation

Sonar is working with Microsoft Azure to prevent this type of outage in the future wherever possible.

Next Steps

If you have any questions about your account, please contact support@sonar.software.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long did the July 11, 2023 Sonar outage last?

Total outage time was 3 hours 55 minutes in Canada (resolved 7:17pm CST) and 2 hours 50 minutes in the United States (resolved 6:12pm CST), both beginning at 3:22pm CST.

What caused the outage?

The outage was caused by the failure of a critical infrastructure host after Microsoft Azure, Sonar's core infrastructure provider, became temporarily unavailable. Restoring service required a full startup of both the US and Canadian data centers.

Was any data lost during the outage?

Netflow-based data usage was unrecoverable if your Netflow device did not cache or resubmit the data while the endpoint was down. Billing processing was paused and resumed once the application was back online.