# Rollbacks & promotions
> Revert to a previous deployment or promote a specific version to production with zero downtime. Manage rollbacks and promotions in Unkey.
When a deployment causes issues, you can roll back to a previous version instantly. Rollbacks switch traffic atomically, so there's no downtime during the transition.
## Roll back a deployment
1. Open your project's **Deployments** tab.
2. Click the three-dot menu on the deployment you want to revert to.
3. Select **Rollback**.
4. Review the current deployment, affected domains, and target deployment in the confirmation dialog.
5. Click **Rollback to target version**.
Unkey reassigns the environment and branch domains to point to the target deployment immediately. The previous deployment stays running until routes are fully switched, so no requests are dropped.
## What happens after a rollback
After a rollback, the affected environment enters a rolled-back state. This only applies to the environment where you triggered the rollback (for example, production). Other environments are unaffected.
In a rolled-back environment:
- The target deployment is serving traffic.
- New pushes to the branch still create deployments, but domains don't get reassigned to them automatically.
- The dashboard indicates that the environment is running a rolled-back version.
This prevents a new push from undoing your rollback. You stay on the rolled-back version until you explicitly promote a deployment.
## Promote a deployment
Promoting a deployment reassigns domains to point to it and restores normal behavior. After promoting, the next successful deployment from a push automatically receives traffic again.
1. Open your project's **Deployments** tab.
2. Click the three-dot menu on the deployment you want to promote.
3. Select **Promote**.
## Rolling forward vs rolling back
| Approach | When to use |
| ---------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Roll back** | The issue is urgent and you need to restore service immediately |
| **Roll forward** | The fix is quick, and you'd rather push a new deployment with the correction |
Rolling back is faster since it reuses an existing, known-good deployment. Rolling forward (pushing a fix) creates a new deployment and goes through the full build and deploy pipeline.
In production, previous deployments stay running for 30 minutes after a new version goes live, then spin down. In preview environments, deployments stay running until they've been idle (zero requests) for 1 hour. Rolling back to a running deployment is instant. Rolling back to a spun-down deployment is still possible, but takes longer because the containers need to start up again. See [instant rollbacks](/build-and-deploy/deployments#instant-rollbacks) for details.
## Next steps
How deployments progress from build to serving traffic
How Unkey builds your container images