Is Fullstory Down? How to Tell and What to Do

Is Fullstory Down? How to Tell and What to Do

Fullstory captures every user session — clicks, scrolls, rage clicks, dead clicks, form interactions — to give product and CX teams a pixel-perfect replay of what users actually experience. When Fullstory degrades, session recordings stop silently. No error in your app. No alert. The sessions are just gone.

The fastest way to know: Statusfield monitors Fullstory continuously and alerts you within minutes. Without monitoring, you discover a Fullstory outage when you go looking for a specific session replay that no longer exists.

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Common Signs of a Fullstory Outage

Symptom	What's likely happening
Session replays missing or incomplete	Session capture pipeline is degraded
Fullstory dashboards not loading	Query or serving infrastructure unavailable
Rage-click or dead-click heatmaps not updating	Event processing pipeline is lagging
Custom events not appearing in segments	Custom event ingestion is impacted
Fullstory → Segment or Amplitude sync delayed	Data connector pipeline is down
FS.event() calls silently dropping	Custom event API endpoint is degraded
Page load time in Fullstory console extremely slow	Query infrastructure is overloaded

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How to Confirm It's Fullstory, Not You

Before changing your Fullstory snippet or opening a support ticket, rule out issues on your end:

1. Check the Fullstory script load in DevTools

Open DevTools → Network → filter for fullstory.com or rs.fullstory.com. The Fullstory snippet (edge.fullstory.com/s/fs.js) should load with a 200. If it's timing out or returning a 5xx, the CDN or script-serving infrastructure is down — all session capture stops immediately.

2. Check recording calls specifically

Fullstory sends recorded session data to a separate recording endpoint. Filter DevTools for rs.fullstory.com. A healthy recording flow returns 200 on these calls. Repeated failures here mean sessions are not being transmitted even if the snippet loaded fine.

3. Test FS.event() manually

Open your browser console and call FS.event('test', {source: 'debug'}). If this throws an error or returns no acknowledgment, the Fullstory object itself may not have initialized — check whether the snippet loaded at all. If it appears to succeed but the event doesn't appear in the Fullstory UI, the custom event ingestion pipeline is degraded.

4. Check your privacy rules and sampling rate

Fullstory allows teams to configure session sampling rates and privacy exclusions. A 0% sampling rate or overly broad privacy rules will cause sessions to appear missing without any platform-side outage. Verify your configuration hasn't changed before concluding it's an outage.

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The Problem With Vendor Status Pages

Fullstory's status page is updated by their engineering team after they've triaged and confirmed an incident — typically 15–30 minutes after degradation starts. In a session-replay context, that gap matters: every session that runs during an undetected outage is permanently unrecoverable.

Unlike transactional systems (payments, messaging) where you can replay a failed operation, session recordings cannot be retroactively captured. The user's session happened; it just wasn't recorded. That data is gone.

Statusfield monitors Fullstory continuously and fires alerts the moment it detects a degradation — before your product team loses the sessions they needed to investigate a conversion drop.

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What to Do During a Fullstory Outage

Immediate (first 5 minutes)

1. Determine scope — is the outage affecting only recording (new sessions not captured), only the UI (existing replays inaccessible), or both?
2. Note the exact start time — session replay outages create permanent gaps. You need to document exactly when recording stopped so your team knows which sessions to discard from UX analysis.
3. Check integrations — Fullstory syncs session data to tools like Heap, Segment, Amplitude, Salesforce, and Zendesk. If the Fullstory pipeline is down, those integrations stop receiving session URLs and behavioral signals.
4. Hold user research and UX reviews — if your team relies on Fullstory replays for active research, pause those sessions during the outage to avoid drawing conclusions from incomplete data.

Communication (first 15 minutes)

• Alert your product, design, and CX teams that session replays are unavailable or incomplete for this window.
• If you're in a period of active conversion optimization or UX research, document the exact outage window so future analysis accounts for the data gap.
• Do not draw conclusions from funnel data correlated with Fullstory sessions during the affected window.

Recovery

• After Fullstory recovers, verify that new sessions are being captured by running a test session and confirming it appears in the Fullstory UI within a few minutes.
• Identify which sessions from the outage window are missing. For customer escalations that depended on replay evidence, mark them as inconclusive rather than resolved based on missing data.
• If integrations were paused, confirm downstream systems (Zendesk, Amplitude) are receiving Fullstory session URLs again.

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Fullstory Components and What Each Outage Looks Like

Fullstory has distinct systems that can fail independently:

Component	Impact when degraded
Snippet CDN (edge.fullstory.com)	Snippet fails to load; all session capture stops
Session recording pipeline (rs.fullstory.com)	Sessions not transmitted; recordings permanently lost
Custom event API (FS.event())	Custom behavioral events dropped
Data processing / indexing	Sessions captured but not searchable or replayable
Fullstory UI / dashboard	Existing replays inaccessible; data intact but unviewable
Data connectors (Segment, Amplitude)	Downstream integrations stop receiving session data
Heatmaps and click aggregation	Heatmaps and rage-click data not updating

A snippet CDN failure is the most immediately impactful — it stops all recording the instant your page loads. A UI outage is less severe: existing sessions are safely stored, just temporarily inaccessible.

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Why DIY Monitoring Falls Short for Fullstory

A basic HTTP check on the Fullstory snippet URL doesn't give you real coverage:

• CDN and recording endpoint are separate — the snippet can load successfully from CDN while the recording pipeline (rs.fullstory.com) is refusing connections. You'd see "green" while sessions are being dropped.
• No error surface in your app — Fullstory's recording happens silently. If it fails, your application shows no error, your users see nothing abnormal, and your logs are clean. Only an external monitor catches it.
• Sampling and privacy rules — an outage caused by a misconfiguration (accidental sampling rate change) looks identical to a platform outage from the outside. An external monitor gives you independent confirmation.
• Session gaps are not retroactively fixable — unlike database replicas or message queues, lost session recordings don't backfill after recovery.

Effective Fullstory monitoring means checking the recording pipeline end-to-end, not just the CDN. That's what Statusfield does.

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Monitor Fullstory Before Your Sessions Disappear

Statusfield monitors Fullstory and 1,700+ other services continuously. When something degrades, you get alerted — not when your team goes looking for a session replay that no longer exists.

3 monitors, 10 alerts/month, no credit card required.

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FAQ

Is Fullstory down right now?

Statusfield monitors Fullstory continuously and will alert you before your sessions disappear. If you're seeing missing replays or the Fullstory UI is unavailable, check Statusfield for real-time status.

Why are my Fullstory session replays missing?

Check your browser DevTools for failures on rs.fullstory.com (recording endpoint) or edge.fullstory.com (snippet CDN). Failures on either mean sessions are not being captured. Also verify your Fullstory sampling rate and privacy rules haven't changed — these can cause sessions to disappear without any platform-side issue.

Can Fullstory backfill lost recordings?

No. Sessions that weren't captured due to an outage are permanently gone. Unlike transactional systems, session replay data cannot be retroactively reconstructed. That's why early detection matters.

How do I get alerted when Fullstory goes down?

Statusfield monitors Fullstory continuously and fires alerts the moment it detects a degradation — before your team loses the sessions they need. Every plan starts with a free trial — no credit card required.