Serious issue with audiobook app caused by Sanity, resolved with a change rolled out over the weekend.

Dear Sanity team,
We are experiencing a serious issue on our audiobook app which seems to be caused by Sanity and is currently preventing all of our users from downloading new audiobooks on the app. For this reason we would really appreciate a quick response.

All of a sudden our cdn downloads don't respond with the entities that we expect, which leads to un-downloadable content for our users.

After lengthy investigations over the weekend we discovered that the illustrations array and the respective illustration object does not contain the cdn url anymore. This means our illustration images can not be resolved.
The references do not work, meaning that anything that is referenced in another document seems to no longer be resolved.

We have not changed anything on our side. We have not changed the Sanity studio version nor the GROQ query. The issue described is happening on both our production and staging apps, on both Android and iOS.

For now we have reached the conclusion that something might have changed on Sanity's side? Has anything GROQ related deprecated? All the other assets can be loaded smoothly.

I hope you understand how urgent and potentially damaging this is for our business - we'd really appreciate some support! Thank you.

Query:`const bookListFields = ``
"slug": slug.current,
"bookSample": bookSample.asset -> {url, size},
themes[] ->,
categories[] ->,
creators[] -> {
...,
"portrait": portrait.asset -> {url, size}
},
"illustration": illustrations[0] -> {
...image.asset -> {url, size},
altText
}

*[_type == "book" ${territoryCondition} && (
"user" in access[].roleName ||
$role in access[].roleName ||
$email in access[].emailAddress
)]{
...,
${bookListFields}
}
`

const resolveImageOrIllustration =

const fetchBookDetailsQuery = `
*[_type == "book" && _id == $id]{
...,
${bookListFields},
characters[] ->,
chapters[] -> {
...,
"illustration": illustration[0]${resolveImageOrIllustration},
"notes": notes[]->{
...,
_type == "imageNote" => {
...,
"image": image[0]${resolveImageOrIllustration}
},
_type == "audioNote" => {
...,
"audio": track.asset -> {url, size}
},
_type == "textNote" => {...},
_type == "videoNote" => {...},
_type == "spotifyNote" => {...}
},
"audio": audio.asset -> {url, size}
}
}

👋 I asked for more information about specific error logs in a thread that another member of your team posted, but haven’t gotten them yet. I received a response with a description of what had been tried, but I can’t help you diagnose your issue with that, unfortunately. As I said, I’ve checked on our end and we’re not blocking your project. There also aren’t any changes to GROQ that I’m aware of, but I will ask internally.

In the mean time, can you also share how your client is configured and the version you’re using?

Hi rd,
we don't have any specific Sanity related logs regarding the issue, only errors, that we throw, when something does not work like the download.

Also: the issue did resolve without us doing anything. Did you experience any data loss and recovered those? Otherwise I can not explain, why it suddenly would not work and suddenly work. To me it seems like a weekend bug, that was resolved yesterday evening (morning on your side of the world).

Our client:
We do use Sanity as PicoSanity version: 4.1.1 in our Expo managed React Native application.
This is the config:

'Our Sanity Studio is version

3.6.0

. The latest version is `3.28.0`'

We did not experience any outages or data loss and you are the only person to report behavior such as this. I strongly suspect it was something on your side. Without knowing error codes or logs, there’s not much I can do to diagnose your issue.

Oh, can you also share where you are? It may be helpful as we investigate.

So the company is based in London Great Britain, I do work from Hamburg.The app is used in all over the world

Would you be able to share a link to a query that gave this behavior?

Ok, I tracked down the behavior. A change was rolled out over the weekend to free plans that changed the way that references were resolved on the backend. The scope of this was not made clear to me and I apologize that you experienced it. It has been turned off.

Hi rd! Thank you very much for tracking it down, I was able to identify, that our references haven’t been resolved but I was not able to find anything on our side.
I’m happy that it was resolved, but how can we make sure, that it doesn’t happen again?

Also one question: we are considering to move to the payed plan. Does this change anything in regard of our data fetching? Is there anything to consider for our production environment?

Hopefully, in the future we don’t decide to roll out changes to our backend over the weekend without notifying everyone that it’s going to happen. A paid plan won’t change your data fetching behavior. It’ll all still operate the same under the hook. Paid plans mostly unlock things like more quota and extra collaboration features. Things like an Enterprise plan include guaranteed uptime and dedicated support.