Detailed Root Cause Analysis Report: JCDS Outage
Incident Date: July 17, 2025
Duration: 29 minutes
Impact: Global disruption of Jamf Cloud Distribution Service (JCDS)
Summary and Timeline
On July 17, 2025, a JCDS outage impacted customers globally when a parameter value did not update, blocking content distribution to end-user devices. Jamf restored full service within 29 minutes.
Root Cause & Timeline
Root Cause: The ‘CsaIssuer’ parameter set in non-production was different than the way it was set in production.
Key Events:
11:43 UTC – JCDS was updated to support authentication through the Tyk API gateway using both ‘tenant_id’ and ‘Instance_id’ values. This will support the new API gateway for customers who have not yet adopted tenantID.
11:45 UTC – Incident triage initiated. Post-deployment alerts investigated. Root cause identified.
12:12 UTC – Initiated rollback to the prior JCDS deployment. Services restored.
12:45 UTC – Continued monitoring confirmed rollback was successful and Jamf Pro instances were communicating successfully with JCDS.
Business & User Impact
Unable to distribute content to devices using the JCDS
Affected products: Jamf Pro
Services affected: Jamf Cloud Distribution Service (JCDS). JCDS is a cloud distribution point utilizing server-less deployment architecture leveraging AWS Lambdas to manage file uploads and downloads. Since JCDS is a serverless stack and decoupled from Jamf Pro, changes are deployed to JCDS without customer facing maintenance windows. This type of service does not require downtime for new deployments or upgrades. No customer data loss occurred from this outage.
Gaps Identified
The cloud formation stack’s URL parameter was not updated when the JCDS deployment pipeline ran for production. The team discovered that modifying the default value in the pipeline template does not automatically update the value in the main template.
Pre-production testing did not reveal this parameter update behavior.
Remediation Items & Next Steps
The status page was updated to reflect the outage and ensure customer awareness - Complete
The JCDS deployment was rolled back - Complete
Change the pipeline so parameters are passed in the same way in each environment.
Review rollback procedures to ensure for any future deployment issues.
Enhance pipeline monitoring by improving alerts when pipeline tests fail.
Fine tune additional JCDS alerts for service issues.