A packet broker that performs a health-status check of a proxy server while the proxy server processes one or more proxy connections. The packet broker may attempt to exchange a heartbeat signal with the proxy server, and if unsuccessful, the proxy server is assumed to be failing. In such cases, a failover is desirable. Rather than implementing a “hard” failover, in which no further communication packets are directed to the proxy server, a “soft” failover is performed where the packet broker prevents new proxy connections from being processed by the proxy server, but maintains at least one (e.g., all) of the current proxy connections that are being processed by the proxy server.