topic Re: Excel downloads being blocked in General Topics

Excel downloads being blocked

Peter_Neville — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 10:18:23 GMT

In the last couple of days we've been getting reports from multiple users that they are being blocked from downloading .xlsx files from a cloud service.

I can see that there are multiple entries in the Data Filtering log for each file, and then final one is showing a Threat ID of BIN file and being denied.

Anyone seen anything similar?

Re: Excel downloads being blocked

NuriaTehas — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 11:36:23 GMT

Hi,

Same issue in some firewalls.

I think the problem is originated by the updates in the last content version 9050 - 17th december.

File type BIN was added and some files match this type.

Workarround by now is set Multi-encoding-level in alert.

I hope this helps.

Re: Excel downloads being blocked

Peter_Neville — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 12:02:38 GMT

Thank you, that matches in with when we saw the problem start 13:00 17th Dec. I'll try that fix

Re: Excel downloads being blocked

Peter_Neville — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 14:39:54 GMT

After some discussion we decided we weren't all that happy relaxing the block restriction on the Multi-encoding-level file downloads. Spoke to our PaloAlto support who suggested temporarily reverting to the previous version of the Application & Threats content update 9049-9799, and can confirm that has fixed the download problems.

Re: Excel downloads being blocked

bipereirad — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 22:42:15 GMT

Hi everyone, after the latest automatic Applications and Threats update (version 9050-9804), we started seeing the same issue with .xlsx files—our Palo Alto is detecting them as .BIN. This ended up causing several incidents in our production network.

We’re applying the same workaround mentioned above by Peter_Neville. If anyone has an update from Palo Alto Support or knows whether there’s a fix for this, we’d really appreciate it—ideally we’d like to skip the affected version (9050-9804).

Re: Excel downloads being blocked

l0wd0ct0r — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 09:27:52 GMT

We have also had this issue with our NGFWs since 17th December. Prisma Access was unaffected.

Seems to have been resolved with Apps & Threats definition 9051-9808.

Re: Excel downloads being blocked

M.Bashir643723 — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 07:13:37 GMT

Hi Team,

I would like to know whether Palo Alto has released any official article or documentation confirming an issue with the content update that was released on 17 December.

Re: Excel downloads being blocked

l0wd0ct0r — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 07:45:48 GMT

Not to my knowledge. 9051-9808 completely replaced 9051-9804 (it is no longer available), so it looks like that revision was pulled. I don’t think PAN generally release articles on dynamic updates that have issues if they have been superseded by a fixed version.