A regression was introduced that resulted in some document reports being returned with extracted data missing. This issue was present from 2019-07-16 11:30 to 2019-07-17 13:41 and affected the extraction of vehicle category information from driver’s licenses, a configurable feature that can be requested through the Onfido API.
After a fix for this issue was tested and released, we reprocessed the affected document reports and reached out directly to impacted customers.
The following section outlines the timeline of this incident.
2019-07-16
2019-07-17
2019-07-18
The issue was caused by a change in the code that selects attributes for persistence upon the submission of extraction information. This change was intended to simplify the logic that selected these attributes.
Unfortunately, this caused us to filter out driving licence specific attributes. As these attributes did not have any specific validation rules applied upon submission, these fields were absent in the database and not persisted upon report completion.
Normally, we would use automated unit tests to make sure we maintain existing behaviour at this level of granularity. However, in this case, test coverage was insufficient; while we did test the attribute selection for persistence, we did not test specifically for the driving licence information, thus this omission was not caught.
We take this incident seriously and are conscious of the impact this regression had on some customer workflows. In order to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future, we have:
To further improve our ability to detect and avoid impact, we are working on:
Lastly, the reprocessing step took longer than anticipated and could have been significantly faster. We have codified the process we used to reprocess document reports to simplify any future response.