Changes / Box / [Medium] Issues with Box Edit and Microsoft Office Online
Box: Major incident: [Medium] Issues with Box Edit and Microsoft Office Online
Summary
Box reported a major-impact outage affecting Box Edit and Microsoft Office Online, starting 2026-07-16 21:30 UTC and resolved at 2026-07-16 21:48 UTC (18 min). Box reported full functionality restored after remediation; its postmortem said some customers may have been unable to open or edit files through Open With integrations in the Box web application.
Machine-written from the diff below (Sol; type: incident outage). Check the diff before relying on it.
What changed
Before: not present
After: [Medium] Issues with Box Edit and Microsoft Office Online
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After: major
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After: postmortem
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After: 2026-07-16 21:30 UTC
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After: 2026-07-16 21:48 UTC
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After: Box Edit / Tools, Desktop Applications - Box Edit / Tools, Microsoft Office Integration, Partners / Integrations - Microsoft Office Integration
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After: Box is investigating reports of a momentary issue with Box Edit / Microsoft Office Online. Affected services are subject to change as the investigation continues.
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After: We are continuing to investigate this issue.
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After: Our team has identified the underlying cause of this issue and is working to take remediating steps.
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After: Our team has taken steps to remediate this issue and is seeing improvement for the Microsoft Online service and Box Edit.
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After: After further monitoring, this incident is now considered resolved. Microsoft Office Online and Box Edit has been restored to full functionality.
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After: We recently addressed issues affecting Open With integrations within Box. We would like to take this opportunity to further explain these issues and the steps we have taken to prevent them from reoccurring.
Between 1:00 PM PDT and 2:40 PM PDT on July 16, 2026, some customers may have been unable to open or edit files using any Open With integration in the Box web application. During this period, affected files may have appeared unavailable or grayed out, and users may have encountered permission-related errors when launching an integration. Microsoft Office workflows, including Office Online in the browser and desktop editing through Box Edit, were among those impacted.
The issue occurred after a recent service update unintentionally changed how integration workflows were handled, causing the product to return an empty set of available integration actions for affected files. We resolved the issue by reverting the service to the previously deployed version, after which service metrics and customer confirmations recovered. In addition, we are taking steps to reduce reoccurrence by improving testing, monitoring, and release practices for integration paths.
# Analysis
This incident highlighted opportunities to improve end-to-end testing for integration workflows and our automated detection process.
The failure mode returned an empty action list rather than hard errors, which kept broad service-level signals near baseline and made the impact visible primarily through customer reports.
# Corrective Actions
Box has initiated the following corrective actions:
* Expanded lower-environment end-to-end tests to validate Open With / Office Online behaviors after changes to integration-related code.
* Added targeted monitoring and alerting for integration action and permission-check failures so regressions surface automatically.
* Documented and formalized release and rollback runbooks for integration-related changes, including clear validation and rollback steps to reduce time-to-recovery.
We are continuously working to improve Box and want to make sure we are delivering the best product and user experience we can. We hope we have provided some clarity here and we would be happy to answer any questions you may still have regarding this matter.
Sincerely,
The Box Team
First version of this incident archived by Rewindex. View the live incident.
History of this incident
| When (UTC) | Change | Kind |
|---|---|---|
| Major incident: [Medium] Issues with Box Edit and Microsoft Office Online (this change) Box reported a major-impact outage affecting Box Edit and Microsoft Office Online, starting 2026-07-16 21:30 UTC and resolved at 2026-07-16 21:48 UTC (18 min). Box reported full functionality restored after remediation; its postmortem said some customers may have been unable to open or edit files through Open With integrations in the Box web application. | Major incident |