Notice of upcoming unavailability of Confluence Cloud

[#1]

Hello Atlassian Community members - we want to share that some Confluence Cloud sites will be unavailable for 10 to 15 minutes this weekend.

Customers who are impacted have been informed, with emails sent directly to their site admins and tech contacts. Atlassian is performing a time-sensitive, one-time maintenance operation required by our infrastructure provider to upgrade the operating system that runs the Confluence database. This is not a security update, and the integrity of your site and data are not at risk and will not be affected as a result of this upgrade.

See below for answers to some common questions, and we are happy to address additional ones in the comments on this post.

Why is this upgrade happening outside of the regular maintenance window?

Atlassian is performing a time-sensitive, one-time maintenance operation required by our infrastructure provider to upgrade the operating system that runs the Confluence database. We’ve done our best to plan your upgrade for the most convenient window given your location. The technical nature of the operation requires that customers with different maintenance windows are upgraded at the same time.

What is the issue?

Your Confluence site uses a database to store and retrieve data, including things like page content, comments, and user permissions. This database is managed by Atlassian and operated by our infrastructure provider. The database is dependent on an underlying operating system, fully managed by our infrastructure provider, in order to function properly.

A recent planned upgrade to the operating system by our infrastructure provider has unexpectedly changed some subtle but important rules about how the operating system communicates with the database software, and therefore with Confluence, about how characters should be sorted in database indexes used by both the database software and Confluence. This has created a small risk where, in certain cases, requests from Confluence to the database software will fail to complete. In any of these situations, there is no risk of data loss.

This upgrade will ensure that the operating system, the database software, and Confluence are all sorting characters using the same rules, and requests from Confluence to the database software will complete normally.

Which / how many customers are impacted? Am I impacted?

This specific upgrade will affect a large number of Confluence Cloud customers.

We have sent email communication to the admins and tech contacts of all impacted customers. Please check with your site admin to confirm if your site is included.

What happens if it takes longer than we expected?

If the upgrade takes longer than expected, we will update status.atlassian.com and contact customers.

What is the risk to my Confluence instance?

The integrity of your site and data are not at risk and will not be affected as a result of this upgrade.

Which infrastructure provider is causing this?

This one-time event is required to upgrade from incompatible versions of PostgreSQL database and Glibc library from our infrastructure provider.

I received two emails for two instances at two different times. Why can’t all my instances be restarted at the same time?

Due to the technical nature of the upgrade, we’re not able to align unavailability windows across multiple regions.

The unavailability is based on the region your instances are hosted in. In order to perform the update, we need to apply the OS upgrade across an entire region (US, APAC, EU) at one time. If your two instances are in different regions, we are unfortunately not able to align the unavailability for the two instances.

Can I opt-out of this upgrade?

Due to the technical nature of the upgrade, we’re not able to provide an opt-out or an alternate window.

Why is this only for Confluence?

This issue is only present in specific versions of a database product provided by our infrastructure provider. Confluence is the only Atlassian product using this specific database product and version.

My site has Confluence, Jira, and Marketplace apps. Will non-Confluence products/apps be impacted too?

Only Confluence and any Confluence-specific marketplace apps will be impacted.

[Andy Gladstone]

The insight into what is happening, why it has to happen, and when it is happening, is much appreciated.

[Shari Allen]

Maybe I missed this... but what is the date and time?

[Andy Gladstone]

@Shari Allen on the Statuspage (https://confluence.status.atlassian.com/incidents/03z7mcsld82h) the following dates/times are listed. 

• Saturday, October 15th between 02:00 - 04:00 UTC if the database is hosted in any of our APAC regions
• Saturday, October 15th between 19:00-21:00 UTC if the database is hosted in any of our EU regions
• Monday, October 17th between 02:00-04:00 UTC if the database is hosted in any of our US regions

[Shari Allen]

@Andy Gladstone Thank you! So mine is Monday... is that AM or PM?

[Andy Gladstone]

@Shari Allen I don't know where you are in the US, so you can use this website to convert UTC to local time.

https://savvytime.com/converter

[Swati Raju]

Hi @Shari Allen! You should also confirm with your admin or the tech contact if your site is included in the maintenance window, and when your window is happening. If the admin or tech contact hasn’t received an email from us, it means they are not part of maintenance.