Impact
At least one user encountered an access failure where authenticated sessions were unable to load documentation content, resulting in server-side errors, while the same content remained fully accessible to unauthenticated users. The issue started on UTC-5 26-02-24 18:12 and was proactively discovered 57.6 minutes (TTD) later by a staff member who observed that authenticated users were unable to access documentation due to repeated server errors, indicating a problem with how the backend handled authenticated requests. No customer reports were received. The problem was resolved in 4.9 hours (TTF), resulting in a total window of exposure of 5.9 hours (WOE) [1].
Cause
The error was caused by content that the client expected to receive from the server but was never sent. The root cause was the complexity introduced by dynamic tag filtering from the UI, where the server had to reconstruct all existing documentation tags in order to enable filtering [2],[3].
Solution
Support for tag filtering from the UI was removed, while preserving the same functionality in the search bar. By reducing the use case to only displaying tags related to each article, server-side complexity was significantly reduced, and the bug was eliminated at its root [4].
Conclusion
By removing UI-based tag filtering, the issue was fully resolved, and the overall complexity of the tagging feature was substantially reduced. In the future, we will implement unit tests for Docs to proactively detect and prevent similar issues. INCOMPLETE_PERSPECTIVE < MISSING_TEST