PlayFab incident
Intermittent API failures in Leaderboard, Lobby and Game Saves services
PlayFab experienced a minor incident on November 26, 2025 affecting Lobby and Statistics and Leaderboards, lasting 25m. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- investigating Nov 26, 2025, 12:53 AM UTC
PlayFab APIs are experiencing intermittent failures in Leaderboard, Lobby and Game Saves services due to failures in an underlying infrastructure dependency. API success rates in these spaces are between 80-100%, with retries leading to success. Failures will manifest as 4XX and 5XX errors.
- monitoring Nov 26, 2025, 01:06 AM UTC
A fix has been deployed (4:35PM PST) and failure rates are quickly returning to normal. We are continuing to monitor.
- resolved Nov 26, 2025, 01:18 AM UTC
This incident has been resolved.
- postmortem Jan 07, 2026, 09:14 PM UTC
On November 25, 2025, between 15:15 PST and 17:00 PST, some customers experienced reduced availability when accessing Leaderboard, Lobby and Game Saves APIs. The incident was caused by a DNS outage in the West US 3 region, which affected communication with our infrastructure. The issue was resolved automatically once the DNS service was restored. ### Impact During the incident, the availability of the FindLobby and FindFriendLobbies APIs dropped to approximately 96%, the availability of all GameSave APIs dropped to an average of 80%, and downstream processing for Leaderboards was delayed. As a result, customers were unable to query for lobbies or upload new game saves using these APIs for about 1 hour and 45 minutes. Leaderboard updates were delayed. Service quality was temporarily below our standard threshold. ### Root Cause Analysis The incident was caused by a DNS outage in the West US 3 region. This outage disrupted communication between our Lobby, GameSave and Leaderboard services and their supporting infrastructure, resulting in reduced API availability. The root cause was related to an external dependency and not due to a code or configuration change within PlayFab. ### Action Items To prevent similar incidents in the future, we have enhanced our monitoring systems to detect and report anomalies in API availability more quickly. We are also reviewing our infrastructure dependencies to improve resiliency against external outages.