Incident Summary

On August 7, 2026, between approximately 6:00 AM and 5:30 PM ET, some customers were unable to send offer letters, and some document and resume previews failed to generate. Files uploaded successfully; only the step that converts them into a viewable PDF or preview failed. No data was lost.

 Detection

Identified on August 7 at approximately 11:47 AM ET following customer reports to our Support team.

Root Cause

A third-party service we use to convert documents into PDFs experienced an outage lasting most of the day. During it, the service accepted conversion requests but never completed them. Our system is designed to switch to a backup conversion method when that service reports a failure — but because these requests neither succeeded nor failed, they simply waited, and the backup was never used. Each waiting request also occupied one of a limited number of conversion slots, so delays spread to other documents.

 Resolution

We added a strict overall time limit to document conversions: if the third-party service does not finish within that window, we stop waiting and convert the document using our own backup method instead. We also corrected a related defect that had prevented the backup from being used reliably. Both fixes were released to production on the afternoon of August 7, while the third-party outage was still ongoing, and conversion success rates returned to normal levels the following day.

We then re-processed the documents that had failed to convert during the outage. 

Preventative Measures

·       We fixed a defect that had prevented this service's health measurements from reaching our monitoring system and are adding alerts on the document conversion failure rate, so issues like this are detected automatically and quickly, rather than through customer reports.

·       The new time limit can be adjusted without a code release, and we are documenting a procedure to route all conversions away from the third-party service during a vendor outage.