Degraded Performance of Phrase Strings API (EU) between June 16, 2026 01:00PM CEST and June 17, 2026 11:00AM CEST

Introduction

We would like to share more details about the events that occurred with Phrase between June 16, 2026, 01:00PM CEST and June 17, 2026, 11:00AM CEST, which led to degraded performance of Phrase Strings API, causing customers using the Job Sync with the default connection type to experience failures. We apologize for the disruption and are committed to preventing similar incidents in the future.

Timeline

Jun 16, 2026 @ 01:00 PM CEST – Job Sync began failing for customers using the default connection type. Connectors were unable to authenticate against the Phrase Strings API.

Jun 17, 2026 @ 10:00 AM CEST – The authentication failure was identified by the engineering team.

Jun 17, 2026 @ 10:28 AM CEST – Impact scope was confirmed: Customers using the default Job Sync connection were affected. Customers using personal access token-based connectors were not affected.

Jun 17, 2026 @ 10:29 AM CEST – Root cause was identified: A recent change which added multi-platform token support inadvertently introduced errors with some existing platform tokens.

Jun 17, 2026 @ 10:40 AM CEST – A fix was prepared and submitted for review.

Jun 17, 2026 @ 10:53 AM CEST – The fix was deployed and JobSync functionality was fully restored.

Root Cause

A code change introduced to add support for multi-platform authentication tokens modified how incoming platform tokens are validated and processed in the Phrase Strings API. This change was not compatible with an existing token format used by the default connection type.

As a result, platform tokens were rejected by the Strings API with a 401 Unauthorized response. The connector retried establishing the connection until exhausting its retry budget, causing all affected operations to fail. Customers using personal access tokens were not affected as their tokens follow a different code path.

Actions to Prevent Recurrence

The root cause was a backwards-incompatible change to token handling that was not detected during development. The following actions are being taken:

• Token format compatibility testing in auth changes: When introducing a new token/authentication format alongside an existing one, tests must explicitly cover the transition case—old-format tokens being processed under the new detection logic—not just each format in isolation.