CyberEscape Online - Errors to review in network traffic - Firestore 400 and Undefined 403

If you are experiencing persistent connectivity issues with CyberEscape Online, you likely need to have your IT team and/or Network Security team revisit whitelisting. To more specifically identify the cause, review the network traffic occurring during the experience to see the connectivity errors being produced. Here are some to look out for:

Firestore 400 errors (destination firestore.googleapis.com:443) and 

"Undefined" 403 errors (teams-play.livingsecurity.com:443)

This is a programmatic update to Firestore that records the live status of players in a the multiplayer session, including whether they’re muted, what team they’re on, and their readiness, tied to game logic, visual sync, and tracking engagement. Once one participant is out of sync (by milliseconds), we would expect to see the session behaving abnormally. 

There are a few reasons this could be happening:

1. Participants spread across multiple regions

   When users are connecting from different regions, even a slight increase in latency between them and the Firestore server can introduce timing mismatches during simultaneous document updates. These inconsistencies increase the chance of conflicts.

2. Bandwidth or network quality issues

   Participants on slower or unstable connections may receive and send updates out of sync with the rest of the session, especially when combined with real-time state syncing. This can widen the gap between a user’s local view and Firestore’s authoritative state, leading to errors. We require a minimum of 5 Mbps of consistent downstream bandwidth for optimal performance. If a user’s connection falls below this threshold, they may encounter a “low bandwidth” error message. Even with high-speed internet, users can experience low bandwidth errors if network policies, SSL inspection, VPN routing, or local congestion restrict or throttle traffic to our services below the required 5Mbps.

3. SSL inspection or aggressive proxying

   If users are behind a network that performs SSL inspection (common in enterprise environments), it can interfere with secure connections to Firestore. This might delay request/response cycles or disrupt the connection protocol used by Firebase, potentially contributing to update conflicts or retries.

To mitigate these issues, we recommend the following best practices:

• Isolate session participants by region whenever possible. If your session is hosted in the US region, try to ensure only users from the same geographic region join that session. This helps minimize latency and reduces the risk of sync conflicts. Use consistent Firestore region settings when creating and joining sessions. Hosting both the app and Firestore in the same region as your participants helps improve real-time consistency.

• If applicable, review your network security tools to ensure SSL inspection is disabled for Firebase and Firestore domains. Bypassing those endpoints can improve connection reliability.

• Ensuring consistent bandwidth. Encourage users to use stable connections and avoid shared or throttled networks. If needed, prioritize traffic or switch to a wired connection. Examine policies that may throttle internet speeds.