One post tagged with "sla"

In December 2024, Zendesk published a formal incident report stating that from June 10 through June 11, 2025, customers lost access to all Zendesk AI features for more than 33 consecutive hours. The engineering team's remediation steps were empty — there was nothing to do. The outage was caused entirely by their upstream LLM provider going down, and Zendesk had no architectural path to restore service without it.

This is the provider reliability trap in its clearest form: you ship a feature, make it part of your users' workflows, promise availability through implicit or explicit SLA commitments, and then discover that your entire reliability posture is bounded by a dependency you don't control, can't fix, and may not have formally evaluated before launch.