Service Incident - May 11, 2026 - Billing | All Pods - Issues placing orders

Summary

On May 11, 2026 from 17:55 UTC to May 12 at 23:32 UTC, some customers were unable to complete billing or subscription changes for existing accounts. Customers attempting these changes could see an error such as “your order wasn’t placed”.

Timeline

May 12, 2026 11:27 AM
We are experiencing shopping cart errors affecting billing and subscription updates for existing customers. You may see a "your order wasn't placed" error when attempting any billing or subscription changes, and these adjustments will need to be resubmitted when the issue has been resolved. We will provide further information when we have an ETA or a substantive update on progress.

May 12, 2026 08:02 PM
Working with a partner provider, we have resolved the errors affecting billing and subscription updates for existing customers. Any subscription or billing changes requested between May 11th 17:55 UTC and May 12th 23:32 UTC should be reviewed and resubmitted to ensure the intended changes take effect. We apologize for the disruption this may have caused and thank you for your patience during our investigation.

May 13, 2026 01:06 AM
We continued working with our partner provider and have now confirmed that the errors affecting billing and subscription updates for existing customers are resolved.As shared in our last update, any subscription or billing changes requested during the first outage window of May 11 17:55 UTC to May 12 23:32 UTC, as well as the second outage window of May 13 04:55 UTC to May 13 05:35 UTC, should be reviewed and resubmitted to ensure the intended changes take effect. New billing and subscription updates should now be working as expected, as the underlying issue has been resolved. We apologize for the disruption this may have caused and thank you for your patience while we worked with our partner provider to investigate and resolve the issue.

May 13, 2026 03:10 PM
We are pleased to report that Zuora order processing has been fully restored and remediation is complete. New billing and subscription updates should now be processed as expected. Thank you for your patience while we investigated and resolved the issue.

Primary root cause

A third‑party migration executed to enable a usage‑rating feature performed unnecessary large-scale updates to billing-period data (including historical periods). This led to a prolonged migration job that blocked or degraded some API operations required for processing subscription and billing changes.

Contributing factors

Change communication / readiness: We did not receive sufficient advance notice or operational expectations for the migration, which reduced our ability to staff monitoring and validate early.

Detection and scoping: Determining which customers and transactions were impacted required manual analysis.

Resolution

The third‑party provider rebuilt and completed the migration using an approach that only updated the required billing-period records (current/next periods), reducing load and removing the blocking behavior.

After recovery, we:

Validated that new processing had returned to normal

Identified failed transactions during the incident windows

Ensured customers could retry/resubmit changes successfully

Performed spot checks during subsequent billing runs to confirm ongoing stability

What we’re doing to prevent recurrence

Stronger monitoring and alerting on the most critical billing/order flows so failures surface faster

Improved logging/telemetry to identify impacted customers and transactions more quickly

Tighter change management with third parties, including advance notifications for migrations/maintenance and a shared validation plan

Customer guidance

If you attempted a billing or subscription change during the time windows above and it did not take effect, please retry the change.

If you believe your billing or subscription state is still incorrect after retrying, contact Support and reference this post‑mortem.

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.