Technical Support Severity Levels
(United States)

The Severity level is a measure of the relative impact of an issue on Customer systems or business. Symantec will work to accurately define the severity of the incident to ensure a timely response as outlined as follows.

Critical (Severity 1)

• Severity 1 means the Appliance or other mission critical software is down and no workaround is immediately available.
• All or a substantial portion of Customer’s mission critical data associated with the Appliance is at a significant risk of loss or corruption. 
• Customer is experiencing a substantial loss of service due to the Appliance. 
• Business operations have been severely disrupted due to the Appliance.
• Severity 1 support requires Customer to have dedicated resources available to work on the issue on an ongoing basis until Severity Level is lowered or incident is resolved.

Major (Severity 2)

• Severity 2 occurs when a major functionality of the software is severely impaired.
• Operations can continue in a restricted fashion, although long-term productivity might be adversely affected.

Minor (Severity 3)

• Severity 3 involves partial, non-critical loss of functionality of the software.
• Impaired operations of some components, but allows the user to continue using the software.
• Customer can reasonably work around such inconsistency or impairment.
• Includes “how to” questions and issues impacting individual users.

Cosmetic (Severity 4)

• Severity 4 means the software is functioning consistently and Customer’s usage and productivity are not materially impaired.
• Refers to general usage questions, cosmetic issues, errors in the documentation, feature suggestions and requests for information.

For the Business Critical Support offering, target time commitments for a Severity 1 Error apply to incidents logged 24x7. Telephone Support should be utilized when reporting all Severity 1 Errors, followed by an email to Symantec Technical Support detailing the Incident. Target time commitments for Severity 2-4 apply to Incidents logged during normal business hours.