On Tuesday, April 23, 2024, we received a number of reports of crashes of Element451, affecting both our main interface and external sites for applications, events, and appointment bookings. We promptly informed our community and initiated an investigation to find the root cause. The crashes were not specific to any particular web browser or operating system, as they occurred across various versions of Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and others.

Our investigation revealed that dropdown fields were the common element in all the reports and showed that this issue was not exclusive to Element451 but also affected many other SaaS products. A recent update by Google to the Chromium engine, which is used by several widely used web browsers, introduced this bug.

Google had already identified this issue for a Priority 1 fix on April 18th, five days before we received our first report. It's important to note that not every user with the affected browser versions experienced crashes; factors like memory usage and availability seemed to influence whether the bug would cause a crash. Interestingly, only one of our employees encountered this issue, and despite extensive testing across various browsers, operating systems, and hardware setups, we were unable to replicate the problem consistently.

Google has reportedly resolved the issue in Chrome as of April 25, 2024. Users should update their browser to version 124.0.6367.91 or later as soon as possible to ensure optimal performance and security.

As of April 25, 2024, at 5 PM EDT, Microsoft has not yet released a new version of the Edge browser. It may take additional time for Edge and other Chromium-based browsers to implement the fixes that Google deployed earlier today. We recommend that you keep an eye out for updates and install them as soon as they become available.

As neither Firefox nor Safari uses the Chromium engine, these browsers were never impacted by this issue.