HEP EU04 - RCA – August 11, 2026

Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the service interruption experienced by Clarivate customers.
The goal of this document is to share our findings regarding the event, specify the root cause analysis, outline actions to be taken to solve the downtime event, as well as preventive measures Clarivate is taking to avoid similar cases in future.

Event Timeline

Service interruption was experienced by Clarivate customers served by the Higher-Ed Platform EU04 instance at the Munich Data Center at the following time frame:

August 11, 2026, from 12:04 PM until 12:24 PM CEST.

During this period, the database became unavailable.

Root Cause Analysis

Clarivate Engineers investigated this event to determine the root cause analysis with the following results:

Working jointly with our database vendor, we identified the underlying cause as a software defect within the database platform. The defect caused the database to become unresponsive and connection requests to accumulate, eventually reaching the configured maximum connection limit and disrupting service availability.

To restore service, our engineers temporarily prevented new database connections and terminated excessive active sessions. After the database load was reduced and system stability was confirmed, database connectivity was restored, successfully returning the affected services to normal operation.

A permanent fix from the database vendor is expected to take an extended period, as it involves the vendor's development, testing, and global release cycle.

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

We are actively working to identify additional contributing factors — both application-related and database resource-contention-related — that may add load to the EU04 instance, and applying targeted mitigations as they are identified. We continue to work jointly with the vendor toward a permanent resolution.

Customer Communication

Clarivate is committed to providing customers with prompt and ongoing updates during Cloud events. Ongoing and prompt updates on service interruptions appear in the system status portal at this address: http://status.exlibrisgroup.com/

These updates are automatically sent as emails to registered customers.