News / EXCLUSIVE: CargoWise users hit by global outage in 'major incident'

CargoWise customers around the world reported being unable to access the platform for around two hours today, with users describing widespread login failure and disruption to electronic messaging. 

According to customer notifications seen by The Loadstar, WiseTech Global activated its ‘Major Incident’ protocol after reports of a “current login issue” affecting CargoWise users. 

Progress updates issued through WiseTech’s support portal show the incident was escalated shortly before 7am UK time, with remediation implemented approximately two hours later.

Several customers told The Loadstar the issue affected both WiseCloud and self-hosted installations. 

One source familiar with the incident said it appeared to have been triggered by a reference data update that caused CargoWise to generate login exceptions. According to the source, companies were required to restart process controllers after WiseTech implemented a fix to the affected reference data, although this has not been confirmed by WiseTech.

The source said the issue would likely have affected everyone from small customs brokers to the world’s largest freight forwarders.

One self-hosted user said: “We could not even log in. The only thing that should be affected for us would be eHub, but we were unable to log in after putting in our password.” 

Another customer said the outage effectively rendered the system unusable for their business. 

“99% of users logged in had sessions terminated,” the customer said. “All inbound controlled messages were impacted. We have various routines in place to re-process which we had to initiate once back up and running.” 

The customer added: “Effectively for us, the system was down.” 

Another source described the disruption as severe. 

“It rendered everyone’s CargoWise useless, taking down the global forwarder network that relies on it. This affected both cloud-hosted and self-hosted customers,” the source said. 

However, other users reported more limited impact, suggesting the severity varied between organisations. 

Sean Crook, founder of Australian forwarder Neolink, told The Loadstar only a small number of users within his organisation were affected. 

“Across our 30 users we seemed to only have a couple affected at the end of today for a short period,” he said. “We did get notified by CargoWise. My GM is saying it was an industry-wide issue.” 

Mr Crook added that similar incidents had occurred before, although only rarely. 

One customer noted that a separate disruption several weeks ago had affected EDI and database transfer services on WiseCloud hosting clusters in the US and Germany, although Australia was unaffected. The customer claimed today’s outage appeared to have had a broader impact because it affected both hosted and self-hosted deployments.

The outage appears to have affected more than user access alone. Customers reported inbound EDI traffic was disrupted during the incident, although messages were subsequently reprocessed once services resumed. 

The combination of log in failures affecting both cloud-hosted and self-hosted deployments, together with disruption to inbound EDI messaging, has led to speculation that a shared authentication, connectivity or integration service may have been involved. WiseTech had not provided a root-cause analysis by the time of publication. 

One customer also criticised the quality of recent software releases. 

“The build quality of the software updates in the last month has gone completely downhill, with random errors and issues for things that were never a problem in the past, and their support responsiveness is almost non-existent,” the source said. 

WiseTech had not responded to requests for comment on the outage, the number of customers affected, the cause of the disruption, or the customer concerns raised by users by the time of publication. Some customers said they were disappointed by the lack of communication from WiseTech – others said CEO Zubin Appoo responded personally, immediately.