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Maintenance events ensure your services remain fast, secure, and reliable. You'll receive advance notice for planned maintenance, detailing timing, impact, and any necessary actions. During events, check the Zendesk Status page for updates, and after, validate workflows. Emergency maintenance is communicated promptly. Maintenance typically doesn't affect your service availability SLAs. For concerns or questions, contact Zendesk Customer Support.

Zendesk performs scheduled and unscheduled maintenance to keep Zendesk services fast, secure, and reliable. When maintenance events occur, the goal is to minimize disruption, communicate clearly, and restore service quickly.

If you have a concern about upcoming maintenance, contact Zendesk Customer Support.

This article contains the following topics:

  • Understanding maintenance events
  • Managing maintenance events
  • Understanding how maintenance affects service availability SLAs

Understanding maintenance events

Zendesk schedules maintenance events based on regional and usage patterns to minimize disruption. Duration targets and timelines are set in advance and communicated along with any recommended next steps.

Zendesk avoids major changes during widely recognized peak seasons and prepares validated rollback steps, backups and integrity checks, runbooks, and health checks so we can pivot safely if needed. For planned maintenance, Zendesk provides advance notice with timing and impact details; emergency maintenance is communicated as quickly as possible.

To help you manage maintenance events, Zendesk describes what is changing and which services or components are involved, who is affected (all customers or a specific region or instance), and when the event happens with date, start and end times, time zone, and expected duration. The maintenance notification explains what to expect; whether services will be available, degraded, read-only, or unavailable; and any effects on APIs, webhooks, and authentication or single sign-on (SSO). For example, some calls may rate limit, queue, or retry temporarily; each notice describes the expected behavior and duration. If a read‑only mode is required, the notice will state this explicitly. Additionally, maintenance notices outline any steps you should take before or after the event.

Depending on the maintenance work, products or services may remain available and fully functional, show minor degradation such as increased latency or partial functionality, enter a read-only state where you can view but not write data, or become temporarily unavailable for brief, controlled periods to complete changes safely.

Zendesk validates performance, error rates, and key user flows before closing the event. If you notice anything unusual, you can contact Zendesk Customer Support.

Zendesk classifies maintenance events into the following categories:
  • Infrastructure and security changes: Maintenance such as upgrades to databases, networking, certificates, and overall security posture. Impact of these maintenance events is generally short and targeted, sometimes involving read-only modes or brief restarts. These events are timed and phased to avoid disruptions at peak times and minimize impact. Notices of infrastructure and security maintenance events are provided in advance and clearly describe the scope, affected components and pods, expected duration, and any recommended steps on your side.
  • System updates: Maintenance focused on a specific region, pod, shard, or instance. Impact is limited to the customers using the affected environment, and only those customers receive notification. Notification for system update maintenance include the identifier, region, services affected, and what behavior to expect during the event.
  • Emergency fixes: Maintenance addressing urgent issues affecting performance, security, or stability. Because this work is time-sensitive, impact may be higher than planned events and the schedule is compressed. Notification are sent as quickly as possible and includle the reason, scope, expected impact, and duration.

Managing maintenance events

To manage a maintenance event:

  1. Before an event, review and plan:
    • Review the Zendesk Status page for notification details and share them internally with your operations teams.

      In addition to notices of planned maintenance events, the Zendesk Status page displays information about maintenance activities and their potential impact on system availability. An article is created in the help center for each maintenance event to provide guidance, answers to questions, and instructions. In some circumstances, you might also receive email and in-product notifications.

    • Plan work accordingly for tasks that may be impacted.

      Events on shared infrastructure are standardized to minimize overall disruption; if you have critical constraints, contact Zendesk Customer Support to explore options.

  2. During the event, follow and check:
    • Pay attention to the stated impact. If unexpected errors occur during a maintenance window, check Zendesk Status page for real-time incident updates.
  3. After the event, validate:

    • Validate your critical workflows. If you notice anything unusual, contact Zendesk Customer Support.

Understanding how maintenance affects service availability SLAs

Planned and emergency maintenance may have specific handling under your agreement, but generally maintenance does not count toward your Service Availability calculation. Where applicable, credit policies and SLA measurements are governed by your Zendesk Customer Agreement or service terms.

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