Official Regarding Blank Toolbar Issue last Wednesday

Hi everyone!

Last Wednesday, on Oct 11th at 06:00 UTC, users running Unity 2017-2019 experienced an outage that prevented the Collab Toolbar from loading, resulting in a blank window. We have since resolved the issue but we'd like to share with you what exactly happened.

The Collab Toolbar in pre-2020.1 versions of Unity uses an older Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) which naturally uses an older method of executing secure requests to Services. Our Unity ID Service, which is queried to determine if the current user has a Unity Teams Advanced Seat, was changed in a way that was not backwards compatible with these requests. It had the unfortunate effect of causing that request to never return, causing the Collab Toolbar's contents to not display. Once this issue was identified and rolled back, the window could recover.

Versions of Unity newer than 2020.1 use a newer Collab Window that does not suffer from this issue. Unfortunately, we cannot back port the newer Collab Window to 2018 LTS and 2019 LTS due to the extensive refactor required to implement it. We need to prioritize keeping those older LTS releases stable, and while this newer window could add a lot of benefit to Collab users, the chance of it affecting other Unity users in an adverse way is too high to be worth the risk.

We're deeply sorry for the inconvenience this outage caused.