Announcing the retirement of Zendesk’s On-Premise WhatsApp Hosting

Announced on	Rollout on
January 31, 2023	October 31, 2023

Zendesk’s On-Premise WhatsApp hosting will be removed on October 31, 2023. All of Zendesk’s WhatsApp usage will leverage WhatsApp’s latest offering, the Cloud API, hosted by Meta.

This announcement answers the following questions:

• What is changing?
• Why is Zendesk making this change?
• What do I need to do?

What is changing?

For the large majority of customers, the migration over to the Cloud API has been ongoing since early 2022. Therefore, for the majority of Zendesk’s WhatsApp users, there is no change.

However there are two groups that will be impacted by this change.

1. Any customers who use our WhatsApp integration to message Turkish end users. Once all Zendesk customers are moved to the Cloud API, it will no longer be possible to message customers with Turkish phone numbers. If the business has a turkish number and messages a customer with a non-Turkish number, there is no issue. This is a WhatsApp limitation, see here. 
   
2. Any Sunshine Conversations ISV customers who are a Meta Business Solution Provider and wish to use their own WhatsApp credentials with Sunshine Conversations to power their own WhatsApp service. The new Cloud API requires an API secret for message sending, something that wasn’t previously required. Due to the potential for security concerns associated with storing and using your API secret with our WhatsApp integration, we will not be offering this as an option.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

With the introduction of the Cloud API, Meta has confirmed that they will prioritize new features for their Cloud API solution over On-Premise hosting. Given this, and the considerable maintenance costs, we have decided to retire our On-Premise hosting solution later this year. We have tested the stability and reliability of the Cloud API service over the last year and we are confident that this is a robust and reliable solution for our many WhatsApp users.

Adopting the Cloud API has allowed Zendesk to stop charging hosting fees to use the WhatsApp Business API solution, which has made the service affordable and accessible to more customers.

What do I need to do?

The following suggestions can be specifically applied to the above mentioned groups.

1. If you have a group of Turkish end users contacting your business over WhatsApp, we would suggest that you transition the conversation to another channel. Zendesk supports a native Messaging offering as well as multiple 3rd party social channels. If you need assistance selecting a suitable channel please reach out so that we can best advise. If you fall into this group, you do not need to do anything to migrate over to the Cloud API, this will be done automatically as of October 31st, 2023.
   
   
2. Our impacted ISV customers will need to use their WhatsApp Business API access to build a direct integration to the WhatsApp Business API or find a partner who plans to continue offering access to WhatsApp’s On-Premise solution. Please contact your Account Manager if you’d like to discuss your options in more detail. 

We understand that for some this change may be more challenging and we encourage you to contact us so that we can help make this transition as smooth as possible.