A Zendesk outage is not something you can fix, but how you respond in the first 15 minutes decides how much it costs you. This guide covers confirming the outage, limiting the damage, and keeping customers informed.
How do I confirm Zendesk is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live Zendesk status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, Zendesk's own status page at status.zendesk.com/. If the official page still shows green, do not assume you are wrong: vendors often acknowledge incidents well after they start. If both look clean, the problem is more likely your store's configuration or a specific integration.
What does a Zendesk outage look like?
- Agent workspace not loading, erroring, or logging agents out
- New tickets not arriving despite customers confirming they emailed
- Chat or messaging widget on your store failing to connect
- Help center pages returning errors
- Zendesk API errors in integrations and apps that read or create tickets
What breaks in your store
When Zendesk goes down, your support operation stalls: agents cannot load tickets or get logged out, incoming emails queue on Zendesk's side instead of reaching the inbox, and embedded chat or messaging widgets on your store stop connecting. Your help center can go down too, removing self-service exactly when contact volume rises. Customers do not stop having problems during the outage, so a backlog builds and first-response metrics blow out for the day.
For context, Zendesk has had no major incidents in the last 90 days of StatusBird's independent monitoring (100.0% availability), so a real outage is unusual. That makes it easy to mistake one for a problem on your end, which is why confirming first matters.
What to do during the outage
- Monitor the underlying support mailbox directly in Gmail or your mail provider if forwarding allows it.
- Post a notice on your site and social channels giving an alternate contact method.
- Keep a shared document of customer issues handled out-of-band so tickets can be created later.
- Pause SLA-based escalation automations to avoid a storm of false breaches after recovery.
- Triage the backlog by order value and urgency once the workspace loads again.
Frequently asked questions
Are customer emails lost while Zendesk is down?
Usually not. Email is queued and retried by mail servers, so messages sent during an outage generally convert into tickets once Zendesk recovers, sometimes with delay. Chat and messaging conversations that never connected are the more likely permanent gap.
How do I keep supporting customers during a Zendesk outage?
Fall back to the raw mailbox behind your support address if you retain access to it, and publish a temporary contact route on your site or social profiles. Log every out-of-band interaction so you can create tickets afterward and keep your history complete.
After the outage
Once Zendesk recovers, verify the affected workflows end to end rather than trusting the status page. Note the start and end times while they are fresh: if you are on a paid Zendesk plan with an SLA, documented downtime is what a service credit claim is built on. See how to claim SLA credits for the process.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks Zendesk's status every 2 minutes, around the clock, independently of the vendor. The availability figure counts major and critical outages only; minor degradation is excluded so numbers are not skewed by vendors that report small blips near-continuously. Grades run from A+ to F. See the live numbers on the Zendesk reliability page and current status on the Zendesk status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors Zendesk and 83 other services online stores depend on, plus your own storefront, every 2 minutes. When something goes down you get an SMS, email, or Slack alert with plain-English context, usually before the official status page catches up. Start monitoring free, no card required for the free plan.