Outage in Blackboard
Ally OCR PDF Failures
Resolved MinorIncident Report
Summary AI Generated
Blackboard's Ally service experienced intermittent OCR failures for scanned PDFs across all global regions, affecting the Instructor Feedback and Alternative Formats features for approximately 14.5 days. The root cause was identified as an error during the final export step when converting files to OCR PDF format. The issue was resolved after failure rates returned to expected levels, with the Ally team continuing to work with their OCR provider on process improvements.
We are investigating a potential issue with Ally's underlying OCR (Optical Character Recognition) process that is causing an increased number of failures when attempting to OCR a scanned PDF in both the Instructor Feedback and Alternative Formats. These features remain available and the issue appears to be intermittent and not impacting every scanned PDF at this time. We are investigating with our OCR provider to determine the root cause.
Components affected
Blackboard Ally - Europe Blackboard Ally - Asia Pacific Blackboard Ally - Canada Blackboard Ally - Australia Blackboard Ally - North AmericaTrusted by 1,000+ teams
The Status Page Aggregator with Early Outage Detection
Stop finding out about outages from your users. Monitor 6,320+ cloud services and get alerted the second something breaks.
Latest Updates ( sorted recent to last )
RESOLVED
8 days ago - at 09/15/2026 12:27AM
OCR Processing has remained within expected levels. Analysis shows the potential cause of the initial issue as an error during the final export step when converting to OCR PDF. The Ally team continues to work with our OCR provider to determine potential improvements to this process.
MONITORING
14 days ago - at 09/08/2026 07:02PM
While we have seen failure rates decrease over the last week we continue to monitor this with our OCR provider to determine any additional next steps.
INVESTIGATING
23 days ago - at 08/31/2026 12:18PM
We are investigating a potential issue with Ally's underlying OCR (Optical Character Recognition) process that is causing an increased number of failures when attempting to OCR a scanned PDF in both the Instructor Feedback and Alternative Formats. These features remain available and the issue appears to be intermittent and not impacting every scanned PDF at this time. We are investigating with our OCR provider to determine the root cause.
Latest Blackboard outages
Status Update – Blackboard Attendance - 1 day ago
Blackboard LMS: Discussion Forum or other Assessment Visible in Course with Inherited Release Conditions - 18 days ago
Blackboard Service Interruption - about 1 month ago
Service disruption for some clients in US - about 1 month ago
Few Blackboard SaaS clients are facing Intermittent outage - about 1 month ago
The Status Page Aggregator with Early Outage Detection
With IsDown, you can monitor all your critical services' official status pages from one centralized dashboard and receive instant alerts the moment an outage is detected. Say goodbye to constantly checking multiple sites for updates and stay ahead of outages with IsDown.
Start free trialNo credit card required · Cancel anytime · 6320 services available
Integrations with
