Back to all posts July 6, 2026

Incident Report: Malformed Model Export URLs (July 4–6, 2026)

Status: Resolved

Summary

Between July 4 and July 6, 2026, MetaPerson Creator returned a malformed model URL in the model_exported event. The URL was missing its host — for example https:///avatars/<id>/model.glb instead of https://metaperson.avatarsdk.com/avatars/<id>/model.glb. Avatars generated and exported normally inside the Creator, but any integration that downloaded the exported model from that URL failed. The issue is now fully fixed.

Impact

Web integrations using the JS API received a host-less model URL from model_exported.
Fetching the model via that URL failed, so downstream steps (saving, conversion, delivery) broke for exports created during the window.
Avatar creation, customization, and the export action itself were not affected — only the returned URL string.

Note for developers: the bad URL didn’t always fail loudly. new URL("https:///avatars/…") does not throw — the WHATWG URL parser collapses the extra slashes and reads avatars as the hostname. So some integrations silently mis-fetched instead of erroring, which made the failure harder to spot.

Timeline (UTC)

Jul 4, ~10:30 — regression deployed; export URLs begin omitting the host.
Jul 6 — issue identified and root-caused.
Jul 6 — fix deployed; export URLs restored to the correct, fully-qualified form.

Root cause

A regression in our export pipeline left the base host empty when composing the model URL, producing an empty authority (https:///…).

Resolution

URL generation has been corrected — model_exported again returns a fully-qualified URL — and we’ve added validation to prevent host-less URLs from being emitted, plus a test to catch this class of regression going forward.

Action required

None. If you added a temporary workaround (e.g. reconstructing the host from your iframe origin), it’s safe to keep or remove — correct URLs pass through such fallbacks unchanged.

We’re sorry for the disruption and any exports lost during this window. If you still see malformed URLs, please reach out at support@avatarsdk.com.