PlayFab incident response procedures

PlayFab is committed to the reliable operation of our services 24/7. However, incidents do occur, and the PlayFab service has extensive monitoring and alerting in place to create service incidents that are managed by our engineering team. This page describes the process by which those issues are handled, how you can raise similar incidents to our attention, and how PlayFab communicates our status during incident mitigation.

Alerting PlayFab

If you are a PlayFab Premium or Enterprise tier customer, you have the ability to create Emergency tickets in the Game Manager support ticket creation page. Please note that Emergency tickets must only be used for cases that are live-title impacting issues, and where you have reviewed the issue sufficiently to determine that there is valid reason to believe that the cause is an error in the PlayFab backend. Emergency tickets must not be used for general technical support.

Ongoing management of incidents

PlayFab’s incident management procedures vary depending on the severity of the incident. The taxonomy we use to assess incident severity is shown in the table below:

Severity	PlayFab Status Label	Description	Response Expectation
1	Critical	Critical outage across multiple systems. These are exceptionally rare outages that impact multiple PlayFab systems and a wide swatch of player activity. For example, an inability to sign-in or create entity tokens.	Worked 24x7 until resolved. Initial review in 15 minutes or less. For issues raised by external developers, communications will be within an hour, if the issue is confirmed as a valid service issue.
2	Major	These outages impact a limited set of PlayFab sub-systems but are causing player-facing impact for a wide swatch of customers.	Worked 24x7 until resolved. Initial review in 15 minutes or less. For issues raised by external developers, communications will be within an hour, if the issue is confirmed as a valid service issue.
3	Degradation	These incidents are impacting players but are limited to a specific region or not typically fatal to the gameplay experience.	Worked 24x7 until resolved. Initial review in 30 minutes or less. For issues raised by external developers, communications will be during normal business hours, if the issue is confirmed as a valid service issue.

Note

The Status Labels listed in the table are the ones used on our System Status site status.playfab.com.

Severity 1 and 2 outages will be reported as a Major Outage on status.playfab.com. On-going updates will be provided every 30 minutes through status.playfab.com, Slack, and Teams.

Severity 3 outages will be reported as a Degradation on status.playfab.com, with on-going updates every 60 minutes. These incidents are not communicated through Slack or Teams.

In some cases, PlayFab may detect that a Severity 2 or Severity 3 outage is occurring but only impacting one or two titles. In these situations, we will not post to status.playfab.com. Instead, we will post to your specific Slack or Teams channel and provide updates every 30-60 minutes.