Update knackers hundreds of Zendesk helpdesks

Fix blunder Twitter chunder 'great confusion' followed

By Paul Kunert • Get more from this author

Posted in Small Biz, 18th November 2011 12:43 GMT

Free whitepaper – Enabling Datacenter and Cloud Service Management for Mid-Tier Enterprises

The boss at cloud-based online helpdesk software provider Zendesk has apologised for a brief outage last night that suspended 360 client accounts.

The firm, which counts big names including Adobe, Sony, Xerox, Groupon, Dropbox and Rackspace among its customers, experienced unexpected downtime for forty minutes from 22.15 GMT.

The issue came amid a weekly software release, the firm said in a blog post: "A change to the way we suspend accounts caused us to erroneously suspend the affected customers."

It responded by suspending all accounts to restore service, but this resulted in Twitter-linked support tickets being created on some accounts that had long been dormant.

"Once we realised this, we disabled Twitter functionality for all accounts until we determined which accounts should be correctly suspended," Zendesk added.

The firm said it's reviewing the way it manages suspended accounts and exploring checks to prevent the issue reoccurring.

In a tweet, CEO Mikkel Svane said: "Sorry. We wrongfully suspended some accounts today. Then revived some old trials. To great confusion for everybody." ®

Free whitepaper – Enabling Datacenter and Cloud Service Management for Mid-Tier Enterprises