Service Incident - May 19, 2026 - Chat | Pod 27 - Chat errors and disconnections

Summary

On May 19, 2026 from 14:23 UTC to 14:37 UTC, Chat customers experienced a complete outage of live chat functionality on Pod 27. During this time, agents were disconnected from existing chats and no new chats could be initiated.

Timeline

May 20, 2026 01:11 UTC | May 19, 2026 18:11 PT

We are aware of an issue affecting Zendesk Chat causing server errors. Our engineering team is actively investigating the issue, but we are already beginning to see some improvement. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and will provide updates as they become available.

May 20, 2026 01:24 UTC | May 19, 2026 18:24 PT
We are seeing significant improvement from the issue affecting Zendesk Chat causing server errors, and our team is monitoring to ensure full recovery. Please let us know if you are still experiencing any issues.

May 20, 2026 02:36 UTC | May 19, 2026 19:36 PT
We are happy to report that the issue affecting Zendesk Chat causing server errors has been resolved, and Chat is functioning as expected at this time. Please note that a subset of chat transcripts during the window of impact may be missing, but will be backfilled via an automated process within the next few hours. Thank you for your patience during our investigation.

Root Cause Analysis

This incident was caused by a hardware failure on the underlying cloud infrastructure hosting the Chat service on Pod 27. The affected host experienced status check failures that rendered the chat service unavailable.

Resolution

Our automated remediation system detected the host failure and performed a stop/start cycle on the affected instance. The service came back online successfully within approximately 10 minutes of the initial failure detection. Our team confirmed full service recovery and monitored the system to ensure stability.

Remediation Items

Enhance automated host health detection tooling to speed up the server recovery.

Work with hosting provider to understand infrastructure failure and server restart delays.

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.