Three of the four helpdesk platforms StatusBird tracks, Freshdesk, Tidio, and Zendesk, went the full 90 days at 100% uptime with zero major or critical incidents. Gorgias, the helpdesk most tightly woven into Shopify support workflows, came in just behind at 99.86% after a single incident of 168 minutes on June 12, 2026.
The margin between first and last here is small, under three hours across an entire quarter, which makes support one of the healthier categories in our dataset. All numbers below come from StatusBird's independent status checks, run every 2 minutes over the 90 days ending July 2026.
Helpdesk reliability rankings, 90 days to July 2026
| Rank | Service | 90-Day Uptime | Grade | Incidents |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 (tie) | Freshdesk | 100% | A+ | 0 |
| 1 (tie) | Tidio | 100% | A+ | 0 |
| 1 (tie) | Zendesk | 100% | A+ | 0 |
| 4 | Gorgias | 99.86% | B+ | 1 |
How each helpdesk performed
Zendesk: 100% uptime, 0 incidents
Zendesk is the enterprise standard for customer support, handling tickets, chat, and voice for teams of every size. Across 43,000+ independent checks this quarter, we recorded zero major or critical incidents. For merchants running high ticket volumes through it, that is a quarter with no asterisks.
Freshdesk: 100% uptime, 0 incidents
Freshdesk is the value-priced full-featured helpdesk, popular with stores that outgrew a shared inbox but do not want enterprise pricing. It matched Zendesk with a perfect record over 45,000+ checks and an A+ grade.
Tidio: 100% uptime, 0 incidents
Tidio focuses on live chat and AI chatbots for smaller stores, often serving as the entire support stack for a one-person brand. Live chat is the most latency-sensitive support channel there is, and Tidio delivered 100% uptime across more than 61,000 checks.
Gorgias: 99.86% uptime, 1 incident
Gorgias is the helpdesk built specifically for e-commerce, pulling Shopify order data directly into tickets so agents can refund, duplicate, or edit orders without leaving the conversation. Its one incident, 168 minutes on June 12, 2026, is the only blemish in the category. A single sub-3-hour outage in 90 days is a solid record and keeps Gorgias at B+, but it is worth remembering that a Gorgias outage hits harder than a generic helpdesk outage, because agents lose not just tickets but their window into orders.
Why helpdesk uptime is really about outage timing
Support downtime has an unusual property: its cost depends almost entirely on when it lands. The same 168-minute outage is a shrug on a quiet Tuesday and a serious problem during a shipping-deadline week or a product recall, when ticket volume spikes and customers interpret silence as being ignored. Chat widgets add a second wrinkle, since they sit on your storefront: depending on the failure, a down chat platform either disappears quietly or shows shoppers a widget that never answers.
There is also a compounding effect with the rest of your stack. When something upstream breaks, say your payment processor or shipping software, ticket volume surges at exactly the moment your team needs the helpdesk most. That correlation between infrastructure incidents and support load is one of the threads in our 2026 e-commerce infrastructure reliability report, and it is a good argument for monitoring the helpdesk alongside everything it fields complaints about. If Stripe goes down and Gorgias goes down in the same window, you want to know both immediately.
Preparing for the outage this data says will be rare
One incident across four platforms in 90 days means helpdesk outages are infrequent, which is precisely why teams are unprepared when they hit. A minimal contingency plan costs an hour to write: keep an exportable copy of your saved replies somewhere outside the helpdesk, make sure at least two people know how to access the raw support inbox directly if the ticketing layer dies, and decide in advance what your chat widget should do during an outage, ideally pointing shoppers to email rather than an unresponsive box. Gorgias users specifically should know how to process a refund natively in Shopify admin, since that is the workflow a Gorgias incident takes away. None of this matters until the one afternoon it is the only thing that matters.
How we measure reliability
StatusBird runs an independent status check against each helpdesk every 2 minutes, day and night, and aggregates results over the trailing 90 days, current as of July 2026. Availability counts major and critical outages only; minor degradation is excluded. Grades run from A+ to F. Live numbers are on the StatusBird reliability tracker, with the full dataset analyzed in the State of E-commerce Infrastructure 2026 report.
Know when your support stack needs support
StatusBird monitors Gorgias, Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Tidio every 2 minutes and sends you an SMS the moment a status change is detected, so your team hears about a helpdesk outage from you and not from an angry customer on social media. Monitor your support tools alongside Stripe, Shopify, and 80+ other e-commerce services in one dashboard. Start monitoring free.