Service Incident - May 27, 2026 - Support and Chat | Pod 25 - Chat, Messaging, ticket views latency for some customers

Summary

On May 27, 2026 from 5:00 UTC to 7:00 UTC, some Support customers in Pod 25 experienced delays of up to 5 minutes for chat and messaging assignments in both Messaging and Support channels. Tickets were slow to appear in Support views, and assignment failures increased due to high latency.

Timeline

May 26, 2026 23:03 PDT | May 27 6:03 UTC

We are investigating chat and messaging routing delays in Support and Chat on Pod 25. Our team is investigating at the highest priority. More to come.

May 26, 2026 23:34 PDT | May 27 6:34 UTC

Our team continues to investigate chat and message routing delays in Support and Chat for a small subset of customers on Pod 25. Tickets may also be slow to appear in Support views. We had a period of minimal delays in the last 30 minutes, however delays have increased at the time of this message. We will provide an update when we have more to share.

May 27, 2026 00:11 PDT | 7:11 UTC

We are happy to report that we have identified and resolved the underlying issue impacting chat and message routing on Pod 25. Latency has returned back to normal for all affected services. Thank you for your your patience during this incident.

Root cause analysis

We run an internal, automated balancing job designed to keep backend workload evenly distributed. During this incident, that balancing job initiated an unusually large data redistribution (hundreds of gigabytes of data movement).

That unexpected volume of internal data movement:

Increased load on the event-processing layer

Slowed the processing and publishing of events used by routing and indexing

Caused backlogs to build, which translated into customer-visible delays

Resolution

We resolved the issue by:

Stopping/turning off the automated balancing activity responsible for the large data movement

Monitoring recovery until processing backlogs cleared and end-to-end latency returned to normal

What we’re doing to prevent recurrence

We’re taking steps to reduce both the likelihood and impact of a repeat:

Adding safeguards so automated balancing cannot initiate redistributions of this magnitude without additional controls

Improving monitoring/alerting for abnormal internal data movement and early backlog growth

Reviewing capacity and tuning to better tolerate elevated internal load without customer-visible delay

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.