Stephanie Morillo

3 minute read

Starting the weekend of September 9th, Developer Site users may have noticed one of two issues affecting their ability to use or request personal developer instances (PDIs): (1) the Developer Site was showing no PDIs were available and (2) some PDIs were erroneously showing as offline. Both of these issues have been escalated to engineering and are being investigated. Read on to understand what is happening and what you can do next.

Why can’t I create a new PDI?

When all the PDIs in the PDI pool have been allocated to users, users can’t request a new instance until more have been added to the pool. This sometimes happens when there is high demand for a release, which we are seeing with the Tokyo EA instances. While the engineering team actively monitors PDIs to ensure there are always available PDIs in the pool, the demand for Tokyo spiked before more instances could get added to the pool.

However, more PDIs are being added to the pool and we’re working through a waitlist of users who want to provision a new PDI. Once we’ve gone through the waitlist, more PDIs will be available for all users. Come back to the Developer Site in a few days to request a new instance.

Why is my PDI showing offline?

Over the weekend, engineering noticed a separate (but unrelated) issue where tens of thousands of PDIs were offline. Various engineering teams are now working to bring up all the PDIs at the rate of 200 per hour, so it will take some time for all offline PDIs to come back online. Try logging back to your PDI in a few days.

I have important data on my PDI that I need to access. What should I do?

Unfortunately, you will need to wait until your PDI is online to be able to access whatever data is stored on your PDI.

Important reminder: PDIs do not have the performance or reliability of customer instances and any data lost cannot be recovered. PDIs should never be used for anything other than learning and exploring basic scenarios. Production and demo code should not be hosted on a PDI. All data on PDIs should be backed up via source control or update sets so information can be transferred if needed. Finally, please note that PDIs are an unsupported resource.

More questions about PDI? Bookmark the PDI FAQ guide for answers to common questions and the Managing Your PDI guide for tips on managing your PDI via the PDI dashboard.

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 14:

Many PDIs have starting coming back online since yesterday, September 13, and provisioning is also coming back slowly. We expect the recovery efforts to continue through the weekend.

If you’ve received a notice that your PDI will be reclaimed due to inactivity, it will be reclaimed once the system is up and running. Thereafter, you will need to request a new instance on the Developer Site.


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