Published August 16, 2026

When Zendesk Goes Down

First check the status page, then worry about your customers, then plan for the mess that arrives when it comes back.

Checking properly

Zendesk publishes a status page covering each pod, and your account lives on a specific pod, so a green overall status can coexist with your instance being unavailable. Check your own pod rather than the headline.

Subscribe to updates for your pod before you need them. Finding the status page during an incident is time you do not have.

What to do during an outage

Tell customers before they tell you. A banner on your site and a note on social costs nothing and prevents a large share of the contacts.

Keep a fallback inbox. A plain mailbox that still receives email means nothing is lost, even though it will need reconciling afterwards.

Do not promise a restoration time you cannot control. You are downstream of somebody else incident.

Write down what you did. The reconciliation afterwards is much easier with a timeline.

The duplicate flood afterwards

This is the part nobody plans for and everybody experiences.

During an outage customers try to reach you and appear to fail. So they try again. And again through a different channel. When service is restored, everything queued up is delivered at once and your queue fills with three versions of the same request from the same person, plus everything from the fallback inbox that has to be imported.

Post-outage duplicate rates are dramatically higher than normal, and it lands on a team that is already behind. Automatic merging turns that pile back into a real queue in minutes rather than a day of manual triage.