Service Incident - October 13, 2025 - Multiple pods | Support - Inbound emails via Gmail connector not being received in Zendesk

SUMMARY

On October 13, 2025, between 08:25 UTC and 14:44 UTC, we received 88 customer reports regarding issues with emails and tickets not being received in Zendesk through the Gmail Connector.

Timeline

October 13, 2025 13:58 UTC | October 13, 2025 06:58 AM PT

We have received reports of customers experiencing issues with inbound tickets and emails from the Gmail Connector not being delivered to their Zendesk accounts. Our engineering team is actively investigating this matter. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience. Updates will be provided as they become available.

October 13, 2025 15:16 UTC | October 13, 2025 08:16 AM PT

Our engineering team has addressed the problem that caused inbound emails from the Gmail Connector to not be delivered to Zendesk accounts to create tickets, normal behavior should have resumed there. We are investigating a manual remediation plan that would allow customers to address emails that were lost during the outage to create and update tickets. We apologize for the disruption and greatly appreciate your patience as we continue to resolve this. Updates will be shared as soon as they become available.

October 13, 2025 16:25 UTC | October 13, 2025 09:25 AM PT

Our engineers have provided the following steps to help you retrieve tickets and emails missed during the downtime:

Within the Gmail inbox of your Gmail-connected external support address:

Select all of the emails from 8:25 UTC to 14:45 UTC, then right click > Mark As Unread

With all emails from 8:25 UTC to 14:45 UTC still selected, right click > Label As > uncheck "Zendesk" to remove the Zendesk label on those emails

Within Zendesk Admin Center > Channels > Talk and email > Email, locate your Gmail-connected external support address, then:

Disconnect it as described here

Re-connect the same address, as described here, making sure to enable "Read and compose emails from your Gmail account"

Make sure you also select "Create tickets from last 300 emails"

Verify your emails have been imported (there may be some chronology issues as responses will arrive in tickets out of sequence).

If you are missing more than 300 emails from the affected time period:

Try the reconnect method above in steps 1-3

Review and identify the remaining missing emails that did not have the Zendesk label

Manually forward these emails from that time period

Recover those emails from the suspended queue in Zendesk Support (Suspension cause: Received from Support Address).

We kindly request your feedback to confirm whether the provided steps have resolved the issue. Please do not hesitate to contact us if the problem persists.

October 14, 2025 00:20 UTC | October 13, 2025 17:20 PT

The Gmail Connector issue is now resolved and the service is stable. If required, customers can retrieve the most recent 300 emails from Gmail using the steps in our earlier message. Thanks for your patience while we worked through this, and apologies for the inconvenience caused today.

October 17, 2025 14:30 UTC | October 17, 2025 07:30 PT

The Engineering team has successfully completed the remediation script to recover any emails missed during this incident. We sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding throughout this process. If you have any further questions or need assistance, please feel free to reach out to us.

Root Cause Analysis

The incident was caused by a change in how incoming emails were processed, leading to inconsistent handling of email details. As a result, the system responsible for creating tickets was unable to recognize certain emails, which prevented ticket creation for messages from the Gmail connector.

Resolution

To resolve the issue, the engineering team reversed the latest deployment and manually reinstated the previous version across all Zendesk pods. This rollback restored normal email processing, which is now functioning successfully.

Remediation Items

Add automated test checks to the Gmail Connector pipeline and improve monitoring dashboards.

Create a script to retrieve older emails that can be used during incidents.

Enable access to necessary tools for Gmail Connector after it is moved to its own system.

Incorporate automated test checks into the deployment process of the SIE system.

Set up alerts for increases in specific email processing errors to catch issues early.

Enhance error tracking by including the source of blocked emails in monitoring metrics.

Repair the monitoring system that checks for missing data to ensure accurate detection.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

For current system status information about Zendesk and specific impacts to your account, visit our system status page. You can follow this article to be notified when our post-mortem report is published. If you have additional questions about this incident, contact Zendesk customer support.