Polaris DC04 - RCA – November 4, 2026

Introduction

This document serves as a Root Cause Analysis for the service degradation 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

Polaris customers hosted in Clarivate’s Chicago Data Center experienced service degradation during the following window:

Wednesday, 04 November 2026 at 07:31 PM CST until Wednesday, 04 November 2026 at 09:35 PM CST.

Root Cause Analysis

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

The service degradation was caused by an unexpected issue within the underlying storage infrastructure, which resulted in significantly elevated resource utilization on a critical storage component. This degradation led to increased latency within the platform and impacted the performance of services dependent on the affected infrastructure.

Although core redundancy mechanisms remained operational, the increased load on the remaining infrastructure components resulted in degraded performance, causing slower response times and intermittent service disruptions for a subset of customers.

Our engineers promptly assessed the impact of the event and worked closely with the vendor support partner to investigate and resolve the storage service disruption. Following the restoration of the storage environment, the necessary recovery activities were completed on the affected systems, restoring normal service operations.

 

Technical Action Items and Preventive Measures

  • We are working closely with the vendor to have full technical analysis of the event, that covers the entire spectrum of the event and have permanent final solutions.
  • Refinement of internal procedures and implementation of automated application health checks and restart capabilities to accelerate service recovery.

 

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.