Secret Server Cloud: US, UK and CA - Distributed Engine Connectivity Issue Affecting Secret Access

Incident Overview

On May 20, 2026, a subset of customers in the US, UK, and Canada regions experienced Distributed Engines going offline, which prevented access to secrets that depend on Distributed Engines. Affected customers were unable to launch remote sessions through Connection Manager and could not perform other proxied secret operations during the impact window.

• Start: May 20, 2026, 11:30 AM Central (4:30 PM UTC)
• End: May 20, 2026, 2:35 PM Central (7:35 PM UTC)

Root Cause and Remediation

During the recent patch of Secret Server, the Distributed Engines in US, CA, and UK were not functioning for a brief period due to an incompatibility issue between the new Distributed Engine and the prior Secret Server version. The new Distributed Engine expected a configuration value that the older Secret Server version was not yet providing, which prevented the Distributed Engine from starting up cleanly. The affected Distributed Engines entered a retry loop and could not self-recover until the compatibility issue was corrected.

To remediate, the latest Secret Server backend was deployed to the impacted regions, restoring compatibility with the new Distributed Engine. The deployment was completed first in the UK and Canada regions, followed by the US region. Distributed Engines in all affected regions automatically re-established connectivity once the deployment was completed, requiring no customer action. Connectivity was confirmed restored across all three regions at 2:35 PM Central.

Preventative Actions

• Implement forward-compatibility testing for Distributed Engine releases, including a response-mocking harness that simulates a Secret Server omitting newly introduced configuration keys, and a per-PR checklist to ensure new configuration reads are covered by the harness.
• Update the Distributed Engine release pipeline to support region-specific deployments, enabling controlled rollout sequencing and tighter regional containment during multi-component releases.
• Strengthen automated testing to verify Secret Server compatibility with both the prior and current Distributed Engine versions.

We sincerely apologize for the disruption this caused and the inconvenience to your operations. We are committed to preventing recurrence through the above actions.