Problems submitting articles?

[janem3689274]

After successfully creating about 20 new articles, I just started getting errors when trying to create more in AEMM. The errors rotate between "There was an error submitting the article, please try again. The metadata includes emoticons, emojis or unsupported characters. Please remove the unsupported characters. [PersistenceException]" and "There was an error submitting the article, please try again." There are no unsupported characters in my metadata and I've tried several different articles with the same result. Anyone else having problems? 

[TommyDAQ-Bates]

Though Ops report most things are fixed now, I'm still experiencing an issue w/ a Collection's image not updating... I've tried uploading a variety of different images, but they do not get passed through the the Preflight app.