PDI incident: Service Interruption: This instance is unavailable.

[major li]

Hi community,

My PDI has been offline for 2 days. And the error message is something I have never seen before. 

Have you ever encounter this issue and any suggestion on how to proceed?

Thank you. 

[J Siva]

Hi @major li 
Since ServiceNow doesn't provide support for PDIs, you will either need to wait until the issue is resolved or procure a new instance and continue working there.
Regards,
Siva

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @major li 

Here are some points to consider:

1. There is no support available for PDI.
2. If you can wait, let's wait a bit longer.
3. You can release this instance and start a new one, but you will lose your previous data. To avoid losing update sets in the future, make sure to take regular backups of your PDI.

There have been 3-4 posts in the community today about PDI failures or unavailability. Based on the responses, you might need to wait 1-2 days and hopefully, the PDI will be back online.

[AndersBGS]

Hi @major li 

As you might know, there is no support available from ServiceNow in relation to PDIs, hence you're limited to two options:

1. Wait, it should come online after some time
2. If you get tired of waiting, release your instance and request a fresh installation. Please notice, if doing so, all development that hasn't been backed up will be lost for good.

[Aniket Chavan · Accepted solution]

Hello @major li ,

Yeah, I’ve seen this happen sometimes— and I know how frustrating it can be, especially if you were actively working on something.

Just a heads-up: PDIs are provided mainly for learning and experimenting, so they don’t offer the same level of stability or support as paid instances. Sometimes they go offline for maintenance or due to system-side issues, and unfortunately, there’s no formal support channel for such outages.

That said, if it's already been a couple of days, there are generally two ways to go from here — either wait a bit longer (in case it comes back), or release it and request a fresh instance. If you haven’t already, it’s good practice to regularly back up your work using update sets or source control, since recovery options are limited once a PDI becomes unresponsive.

You can also check out this official FAQ from ServiceNow — it covers some useful info around PDI behavior and what to expect:
🔗 Personal Developer Instance (PDI) FAQ

Please Mark ✅Correct if this solves your query and also mark 👍Helpful if you find my response worthy based on the impact.

Regards,
Aniket