Incident Status Update:

On the 9th of June, a few of our customers started to experience an outage, where our Web Parts were not rendered on their pages, showing some technical error messages. The reported issues resolved themselves within a few hours.

On the 17th of June, ShortPoint became aware that these incidents are increasing, and the impact is spreading among other customers. The ShortPoint engineering team started an internal investigation to find the root cause of the incident, and ways to solve it.

Why did it happen?

ShortPoint app is a set of CSS & JavaScript files that are served to all our Office365 customers through our CDN (content delivery network), and executed in their browser whenever they open a site that has ShortPoint installed.

 
ShortPoint asks the browser to cache these files for 7 days to reduce the network time, and to provide our customers with a better performance and user experience.By default, the browser will not check for CORS policy (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) on these files, and does not ask the remote server (the CDN) for cross-origin policy headers, and in return our CDN will send the files without any CORS headers.Recently Microsoft did an update to some selected tenants that forces the browser to check for CORS policies. While our CDN can return the correct CORS headers, our files are still cached on the customers browsers without these headers, for the users who have opened ShortPoint before. 

Microsoft & the SharePoint team already indicated that they have fixed the issue, more information about this incident can be found here:  https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-docs/issues/7103 

And for more information about Cross Origin Resource Sharing, please refer to this article:  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/CORS 

What is ShortPoint doing about it?

We at ShortPoint understand the impact of such issues for our customers, and take actions to make sure we will not face such issue in the future and to keep our customers engaged and informed about any possible incidents that may happen. 

In order to achieve that we have taken the following steps:

• All the files that are served from our CDN will always have a cross-origin header, regardless whether the platform is requesting for it or not.
• Our internal automation tests are being extended to detect failures that can happen even outside the scope of the ShortPoint product. These tests will be executed on a daily basis.
• We have launched a status page ( https://status.shortpoint.com/ ) that will give our customers transparency of any incidents.
• Engineering team has built an app that will clear the cache for all of your users (more on this topic in the next point)

What can you do if the issue is still happening to you?

Our team has built an app that can be deployed across your tenant, and will force the browser to clear the cache for all ShortPoint files, 

You may download the app from here:  ShortPointCacheCleaner_v1.0.7.0.zip 

If you don't wish to install any app, you can ask your users to clear their browser cache, and they should not experience the issue anymore.

Important: you only need to have this app installed on your tenant for one week, after that you can remove it and ShortPoint WebParts will not be affected at all.

How Can you be informed about future incidents?

1. Open the status page:  https://status.shortpoint.com/, 
2. Click the Subscribe button, 
3. Provide your email address

You will get notified for any future incident that might happen.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused, and thank you for your continued support and cooperation.