Zendesk Status: When It Goes Down

Check the Zendesk status page first, then worry about your customers, then plan for the mess that arrives when the service comes back.

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Checking Zendesk status 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 don't 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 can't 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's already behind. Automatic merging turns that pile back into a real queue in minutes rather than a day of manual triage.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

How do I tell a real Zendesk outage from a problem at our end?

Check the status page for your pod first. A genuine Zendesk outage shows there within minutes, and if the page is green the cause is usually your network, a browser extension or a recent configuration change.

Where is the Zendesk status page?

At status.zendesk.com, which reports by pod. Find your pod in the account URL or the admin centre, because a red light on another pod does not affect you.

How do I know if Zendesk is down for everyone?

Check the status page for your specific pod. Account-level problems and platform incidents look identical from your side.

What happens to email during an outage?

It's usually queued and delivered on recovery, which is why the queue arrives all at once and full of duplicates.