This outage was due to an automated database software update which required a specific flag to be set on the connection string. As this string was not set by default it caused the application to lose its connection to the database. We added the flag and restarted the service and it recovered the connection without any further issues.

We have identified other services potentially affected by this update and are planning to do emergency maintenance to add the flag now before the automated update happens to prevent an unexpected failure of the services.