Two weeks ago I posted a warning; ServiceNow was reclaiming my PDI with three days' notice. That post travelled further than anything I've written, which tells me plenty of you have skin in this game. So here's the follow-up; what's actually changed, and how to keep your work.
The official bit first, from ServiceNow's developer blog. They're reclaiming PDIs that meet both of these conditions: provisioned 90 or more days ago, and no login in the last 10 days. Warning emails started on 7 July. And the detail that catches people out; background processes and developer-site logins don't count. Only an explicit login to the instance itself resets the clock.
Then there's what the community is reporting. I can't verify these, but there are too many to ignore: reclaim notices landing on instances people were using that same day (a "last used" tracking bug, allegedly), waitlists of ten days to three weeks for replacement instances, and PDIs sitting offline for days at a stretch. One poor soul had theirs reclaimed before it ever became accessible.
So, the survival checklist:
1. Log into your PDI properly, through the instance, at least weekly. A recurring calendar reminder is the cheapest insurance in ServiceNow right now.
2. Back up as if the email arrives tomorrow. Export your update sets, connect scoped apps to source control, export any data you'd miss.
3. Already got the email? There's no appeal and no support queue. Back up today, not on day three.
4. Need a fresh instance? Request an older release and upgrade it yourself; the upgrade takes a few hours, the waitlist for the latest release can take weeks.
5. Treat every PDI as disposable from now on. If losing it tomorrow would hurt, the backup is overdue.
Worth saying: this isn't ServiceNow being difficult. Demand has outpaced capacity and they're trying to get instances to people who'll actually use them. But the difference between a shrug and a disaster is entirely in the checklist above.
Has anyone actually lost work to a reclaim this month? Tell me below; the more data points, the better the picture.
The build story behind Conassi starts here: The shift.
First published on LinkedIn, 20 July 2026. The conversation lives there; the guide lives here.