Resolved after 2 days 16 hours, affecting Playbook Web, on January 11, 2026.
On January 11, a malicious file was uploaded to Playbook and shared with a limited number of users via publicly accessible Shared Pages. Within a few hours, automated scanners - including VirusTotal - identified and flagged the link as malicious. However, some malware protection tools with stricter policies applied a **domain-level restriction** rather than blocking the specific file. As a result, the entire Playbook hosting proxy domain was blocked. While we fully understand the importance of preventative security measures and user safety, we believe this response was overly restrictive - comparable to blocking Google because a single user shared a malicious file. Since then, we have been working methodically with all vendors whose software blocked Playbook, and all known issues have now been resolved. To prevent similar situations in the future, we are introducing stricter file-scanning policies on our end. In addition, we have deployed a backup hosting proxy to ensure continued access to Playbook should a similar issue arise again, minimizing the risk of service disruptions.
Affected components
Update timeline
- investigating Jan 11, 2026, 07:08 PM UTC
We have got several reports about web extensions blocking Playbook URLs. We are currently investigating an issue.
- monitoring Jan 12, 2026, 07:06 PM UTC
We have temporarily downgraded the TLS protocol version to 1.2 to ensure full backward compatibility with existing scanning algorithms.
- identified Jan 13, 2026, 10:59 AM UTC
We have identified malicious files uploaded by certain users, which resulted in Malwarebytes blocking the entire hosting proxy domain.
- monitoring Jan 13, 2026, 11:02 AM UTC
We’ve removed the malicious files and requested a re-scan for all previously reported links.
- resolved Jan 14, 2026, 11:34 AM UTC
This incident has been resolved.
- postmortem Jan 14, 2026, 11:37 AM UTC
On January 11, a malicious file was uploaded to Playbook and shared with a limited number of users via publicly accessible Shared Pages. Within a few hours, automated scanners - including VirusTotal - identified and flagged the link as malicious. However, some malware protection tools with stricter policies applied a **domain-level restriction** rather than blocking the specific file. As a result, the entire Playbook hosting proxy domain was blocked. While we fully understand the importance of preventative security measures and user safety, we believe this response was overly restrictive - comparable to blocking Google because a single user shared a malicious file. Since then, we have been working methodically with all vendors whose software blocked Playbook, and all known issues have now been resolved. To prevent similar situations in the future, we are introducing stricter file-scanning policies on our end. In addition, we have deployed a backup hosting proxy to ensure continued access to Playbook should a similar issue arise again, minimizing the risk of service disruptions.
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