Service Incident - May 7, 2026 - Knowledge | Pod 18 - RBAC: access denied on Pod 18

Summary

On May 7, 2026, between 09:50 UTC and 12:39 UTC, customers using Knowledge (Guide) on Pod 18 experienced issues accessing Help Center content, with both agents and end users encountering “access denied” errors resulting in a black screen.

Timeline

May 7, 2026 10:45 UTC | May 7, 2026 3:45 AM PT

We have received reports of customers encountering "RBAC: access denied" error messages when accessing the Knowledge app. Our engineering team is actively investigating this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience caused and will provide updates as they become available.

May 7, 2026 11:17 UTC | May 7, 2026 4:17 AM PT

Our engineers have observed significant improvement in monitoring metrics related to the RBAC: access denied errors. We kindly request that you confirm whether the Help Center is now accessible on your end. Please contact us if the issue persists so that we may assist you further.

May 7, 2026 14:30 UTC | May 7, 2026 7:30 AM PT

We are pleased to inform you that the issue resulting in "RBAC: access denied" errors has been fully resolved. Our team has observed significant improvements across all affected systems, and service is now operating normally. We sincerely appreciate your patience and understanding throughout this process.

Root Cause Analysis

This incident was caused by intermittent failures in fetching a critical authentication component, leading to access being denied to agents and end users on Pod 18.

Resolution

The issue was resolved as the system self-recovered once the necessary authentication components became available again.

Remediation Items

Add detailed metrics to measure different stages of requests for better performance monitoring.

Enable automatic scaling of key services to handle increases in CPU usage smoothly.

Cache authentication tokens for an hour to reduce repeated authentication and improve efficiency.

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.