On September 16, 2025, between 8:20 PM and 10:42 PM PDT, some customers experienced issues with PlayFab Lobbies. During this period, players across all titles using Lobbies were unable to create, join, or update lobbies, although search APIs remained functional. The incident was caused by a maintenance event internal to our Redis infrastructure, which disrupted connectivity between the Lobby service and Redis. We resolved the issue by rebooting the Redis instances, restoring connectivity and service functionality.

Impact

Players were unable to create, join, or update lobbies across all titles that use the PlayFab Lobby system for approximately 2 hours and 22 minutes. While search APIs continued to work, players could not join lobbies they found during this time.

Root Cause Analysis

The root cause of the incident was a maintenance event within our Redis infrastructure that unexpectedly killed connectivity for the Lobby service. While we have the capability to schedule maintenance, this event occurred exactly when the impact started, leading to the service disruption.

Action Items

To prevent similar incidents from happening again, we have taken the following actions:

• Updated the Lobby service to better display its status on our service overview dashboard, which will enhance visibility and expedite future detection and mitigation efforts.

• Improved our internal processes for scheduling and communicating maintenance events that could impact service connectivity.