Service Incident - April 8, 2026 - Support | All Pods - Inbound emails failing due to connection timeouts

Summary

On April 8, 2026, between 13:30 and 21:49 UTC, customers across all pods experienced connection timeouts affecting emails from Gmail and Google Groups. This caused some emails to be delayed or not delivered to Zendesk, resulting in missing tickets unless the emails were retried or manually resent.

Timeline

April 8, 2026 16:54 UTC | April 8, 2026 9:54 AM PT

Our engineering team has confirmed an issue affecting inbound email delivery across multiple pods, and we are working towards a fix for the behavior. We will provide additional information soon.

April 8, 2026 17:47 UTC | April 8, 2026 10:47 AM PT

Following our engineering team's fix, we are seeing inbound emails deliver successfully. Any previously failed email deliveries should succeed after a retry. Please note that retries are based on your forwarding mail server's configuration, which is outside of Zendesk's control.
If you are still experiencing any issues with inbound email delivery, please let us know and include mail server logs for any delivery failures.

April 8, 2026 18:52 UTC | April 8, 2026 11:52 AM PT

Thank you for your patience. We are aware of an external email provider issue causing deliverability issues that may be contributing to any continued inbound email failures. This external provider has just recently posted an incident to their own status page.
Could you please let us know if you are still experiencing issues, but are not using Google services to deliver emails to Zendesk?
Thank you for your assistance and looking forward to your response,

April 8, 2026 23:25 UTC | April 8, 2026 4:25 PM PT

We have received confirmation from Google that the issue impacting email delivery is now resolved. We apologize that we are not able to help reprocess these emails as we never received them. We suggest as a first step to reach out to your Gmail support providers to understand what options they may have to offer resending of the impacted emails that did not create tickets.

Regrettably if Google is unable to reprocess these emails we would ask that you import your mail once again manually if necessary. We recognize this is not a convenient option and we wanted to provide some guidance to avoid rate limiting and email rejections.

Our recommendation to reimport:

If you have a few emails to process, copy and paste the email content and the requester into a new ticket

Forward the emails to Zendesk and recover them from the Suspended tickets view. Recover each ticket individually because you must change the requester on each email.

If you have many emails to recover, redirect the emails rather than forward them manually. A redirect passes an email as if it never went through the forwarding address. The From: field uses the original sender’s email address and the headers keep the original sender. (ref)

You will need to respect our inbound mail rate limits and avoid mail loop limits. The most important limit to keep in mind:

There's a limit of 20 emails from the same user within an hour. Beyond that, the following 20 updates will be suspended. If more than 40 are received, all additional updates within that hour will be rejected (meaning they won't even create suspended tickets). This serves as a way to prevent mail loops from becoming a serious problem.

We strongly recommend sending batches of emails wherever possible if you must manually forward these emails.
Note: Manually forwarded emails will appear as from the address forwarding them, not the original sender.

Additionally, you may consider using the allow list for your Google support addresses that have mail that need to be resent for additional rate limit headroom.

If you have a high number of emails (more than 500 per sender) that you need to resend, please respond to the ticket so we can discuss options to assist further.

Root Cause Analysis

The incident was caused by an outage on Google’s side that led to connection timeouts when Gmail and Google Groups tried to deliver emails to Zendesk.

Resolution

To resolve the issue, we closely monitored Google's mitigation efforts and updated customers with guidance on recovery, as there was no action available on Zendesk’s side due to message timeouts before reaching our systems.

Remediation Items

Review your email logs for messages sent to your Zendesk support address between April 8, 2026, 13:30 and 21:49 UTC, looking for delivery issues such as timeouts or rejections.

If impacted emails are identified, you should contact Google Support to request reprocessing or resending of those messages.

For emails that cannot be resent by Google, you may need to manually forward or import the missing emails into Zendesk, taking care to avoid mail loops and rate limits by starting with small batches.

Customers with large volumes of emails to recover are encouraged to open a Zendesk support ticket or consult with Zendesk Advocacy for guidance on the safest recovery methods applicable to their situation.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

For current system status information about Zendesk and specific impacts to your account, visit our system status page. If you have additional questions about this incident, contact Zendesk customer support.