ITIL4F Key Concepts of ITIL 4 Practice Question
An e-commerce company experiences a slowdown in its website during a flash sale. The slowdown is not a complete outage. According to ITIL 4, how should this be classified?
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
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An incident, because the service is degraded
An incident is defined as any unplanned interruption or reduction in quality of an IT service. The slowdown during the flash sale represents a degradation in service quality, even though it is not a complete outage. Option A is incorrect because a problem is the underlying cause of one or more incidents, not the slowdown itself. Option B is incorrect because a service request is a pre-defined request for something (e.g., access, information), not an unplanned degradation. Option D is incorrect because a normal change is a planned activity, whereas this is an unplanned event.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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A problem, because there may be a root cause
Why it's wrong here
A problem is defined in ITIL 4 as a cause, or potential cause, of one or more incidents. While a slowdown *may* have an underlying root cause that needs investigation, the slowdown itself is the *effect* experienced by users, representing a disruption to service. Identifying a problem typically involves investigating multiple incidents or a significant incident to find and eliminate the unknown root cause, preventing future recurrences, rather than being the initial record of the service degradation.
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A service request, to increase capacity
Why it's wrong here
A service request is a formal request from a user for something standard that is part of normal service delivery, such as information, advice, or access to a pre-approved service action. Increasing capacity in response to an unexpected, unplanned slowdown is a reactive operational adjustment, often requiring analysis, design, and authorization, which falls outside the scope of a standard, pre-defined, user-initiated service request.
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An incident, because the service is degraded
Why this is correct
An incident is an unplanned interruption to a service or a reduction in the quality of a service. The e-commerce website slowdown directly fits this definition, as it represents a degradation in the expected performance and quality of the service provided to customers. The primary objective of incident management is to restore normal service operation as quickly as possible with minimal business impact.
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A normal change, to add more servers
Why it's wrong here
A change is defined as the addition, modification, or removal of anything that could have a direct or indirect effect on services. While adding more servers would be a *change* implemented to address the slowdown, the slowdown itself is an *event* indicating service degradation, not a planned modification. The change would be a *response* to the incident, not the incident record itself, which documents the unplanned service disruption.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This ITIL4F practice question is part of Courseiva's free PeopleCert certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the ITIL4F exam.