Resolved after 3 hours 29 minutes, affecting Hosted Services - Google, on October 29, 2025.
For Aspen Partners using Content Cafe, the errors it was receiving were saturating the Aspen Database, using 75% of the database capacity for connections. When we turned off Content Cafe, the issue went away. Shortly after we turned off Content Cafe for all partners, one of our partners shared a message from Baker and Taylor explaining that Content Cafe was having issues as a result of the Microsoft outage today. We recommend keeping Content Cafe off for our partners, but we understand you may want to turn it back on. However, understand that if Content Cafe has future issues or once it is entirely sunset, Aspen services will be interrupted until the feature is disabled again. We understand that the 3rd-party integration outage caused you some inconvenience. Our systems and development teams wanted to ensure we not only identified the root cause but also took proactive steps to prevent similar issues in the future, rather than simply attributing the problem elsewhere. Thank you for alerting us to the issue and sharing the message from your vendors. This is an excellent example of how a large community works together to communicate and resolve a problem.
Affected components
Update timeline
- investigating Oct 29, 2025, 05:49 PM UTC
Our operations team is investigating an issue affecting a subset of our Aspen partners, who are seeing "Could not connect to database" errors. We will have an update within one hour.
- identified Oct 29, 2025, 06:04 PM UTC
We believe we identified the core issue affecting partners getting the database issue, which appears to be related to the use of Content Cafe.
- resolved Oct 29, 2025, 09:18 PM UTC
For Aspen Partners using Content Cafe, the errors it was receiving were saturating the Aspen Database, using 75% of the database capacity for connections. When we turned off Content Cafe, the issue went away. Shortly after we turned off Content Cafe for all partners, one of our partners shared a message from Baker and Taylor explaining that Content Cafe was having issues as a result of the Microsoft outage today. We recommend keeping Content Cafe off for our partners, but we understand you may want to turn it back on. However, understand that if Content Cafe has future issues or once it is entirely sunset, Aspen services will be interrupted until the feature is disabled again. We understand that the 3rd-party integration outage caused you some inconvenience. Our systems and development teams wanted to ensure we not only identified the root cause but also took proactive steps to prevent similar issues in the future, rather than simply attributing the problem elsewhere. Thank you for alerting us to the issue and sharing the message from your vendors. This is an excellent example of how a large community works together to communicate and resolve a problem.
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