End Users Not Receiving DocV SMS Links

Incident

Report for Socure

Postmortem

Root Cause Analysis

Report on Socure High SMS Handoff Failure Rate in DocV V5

May 20, 2026

Summary

On May 20, 2026, starting at approximately 9:05 AM ET, Socure's Document Verification (DocV) V5 service experienced a significant increase in SMS handoff failures in the commercial production environment. End users were unable to receive SMS verification links. The issue was caused by the exhaustion of Socure's AWS End User Messaging monthly SMS sending budget, triggered by an abnormal volume of international SMS traffic. Socure applied account-level rate limiting, restricted international SMS delivery, and engaged AWS Support to expedite a budget increase. The incident was fully resolved at 12:15 PM ET on May 20, 2026.

Timeline

• First Alert: May 20, 2026, 9:05 AM ET
• Issue Initially Contained: May 20, 2026, 9:20 AM ET
• Issue Resurfaced: May 20, 2026, 10:44 AM ET
• Issue Fully Resolved: May 20, 2026, 12:15 PM ET

Customer Impact Duration: ~1 hour 46 minutes
Total Incident Lifecycle: ~3 hours 10 minutes

Description of Incident

On May 20, 2026, at 9:05 AM ET, Socure's monitoring detected an elevated SMS handoff failure rate in DocV V5 for the commercial production environment. Investigation revealed that the AWS End User Messaging monthly SMS sending budget had been exhausted, driven by an abnormal volume of international SMS traffic originating from a single account.

Once the monthly budget limit was reached, AWS End User Messaging blocked all outbound SMS delivery from the account. Failures were permanent — messages were not retried once the limit was hit.

Impact

• 100% of SMS handoff attempts failed during the peak impact window
• Affected customers' end users were unable to receive SMS verification links via DocV

Socure immediately applied account-level rate limiting to reduce ongoing spend and requested an emergency budget increase from AWS. International SMS delivery to the top destination countries was also blocked to halt the spend burn while the root cause was addressed. AWS Support was formally engaged with details on traffic patterns and user opt-in flows. Socure published a status page communication to notify customers of the SMS delivery delays and ongoing mitigation efforts. The source of the abnormal traffic ceased sending, and the incident was fully resolved at 12:15 PM ET on May 20, 2026.

Resolution

Socure applied account-level rate limiting and blocked international SMS to some destination countries where we noticed unusual delivery pattern to immediately reduce the rate of budget consumption. AWS Support was engaged to expedite an increase to the monthly SMS sending budget. Once the abnormal traffic was stopped and the budget constraints were addressed, SMS delivery was restored. The incident was confirmed fully resolved at 12:15 PM ET on May 21, 2026.

Mitigation Plan

These measures are aimed at improving SMS delivery resilience and preventing similar incidents from affecting production environments in the future.

We are committed to transparency, timely remediation, and making the necessary improvements to prevent recurrence.

Posted 2 months ago. May 28, 2026 - 14:30 EDT

Resolved

The issue affecting DocV SMS delivery has been resolved. End users should now receive DocV SMS messages as expected.

Posted 2 months ago. May 20, 2026 - 12:39 EDT

Investigating

We are currently experiencing temporary SMS delivery delays for a small subset of users, which may require retrying verification attempts. The team is actively working to mitigate impact while monitoring the issue closely. No customer data or systems have been impacted.

Posted 2 months ago. May 20, 2026 - 11:50 EDT

This incident affected: Socure ID+ Platform (Predictive DocV) and RiskOS Platform (Predictive DocV).