PlayFab experienced a minor incident on September 12, 2025 affecting Photon, lasting 40m. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- investigating Sep 12, 2025, 09:39 AM UTC
We're currently experiencing a higher than normal level of API errors and are investigating the issue.
- identified Sep 12, 2025, 10:04 AM UTC
We have identified the cause for this issue, and are in the process of updating to resolve it.
- identified Sep 12, 2025, 10:05 AM UTC
We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue.
- monitoring Sep 12, 2025, 10:10 AM UTC
We have deployed the fix for the identified issue, and are currently validating API error levels.
- resolved Sep 12, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC
The higher level of API errors has been resolved.
- postmortem Sep 30, 2025, 08:16 PM UTC
On September 12, 2025, between 01:42 AM and 03:09 AM PDT, some PlayFab customers experienced issues authenticating with Photon APIs. The incident was caused by unexpected traffic patterns to Photon API endpoints, which resulted in a hot partition and degraded availability. We resolved the issue by setting a throttle limit for the affected API endpoint. ### Impact During the incident, customers with Photon tokens stored on the hot partition may have been unable to authenticate. The availability for Photon APIs dropped to as low as 78.8%, impacting service reliability for approximately 1 hour and 27 minutes. ### Root Cause Analysis The root cause was an unexpected traffic pattern on the Photon authentication API endpoint. A large call volume on this endpoint put strain on database lookup tables for logging in the user. The call volume was outside normal parameters. ### Action Items To prevent similar incidents from happening again, we have taken the following actions: · Cached results from previous Photon sessions to reduce strain on the database infrastructure. · Adjusted the title rate limit for the Photon APIs.