[AIC/AIR] AIC/AIR May Not Respond - Prod 1

Update timeline

1. investigating Mar 19, 2026, 02:42 PM UTC

   Kustomer is aware of an event affecting AI for Customers and Reps that have resulted in them not responding. Our team is currently working to identify the cause for the issue in order to implement a resolution. Please expect additional updates within the next 30 minutes, please reach out to Kustomer Support via kustomer.com for any further questions or updates.

2. identified Mar 19, 2026, 03:44 PM UTC

   Kustomer has identified an event in AIC/AIR that may cause unresponsive functionality. Our team is still continuing to work on implementing a resolution. Please expect additional updates within the next 30 minutes, please reach out to Kustomer Support via Kustomer.com for any further questions or updates.

3. identified Mar 19, 2026, 04:16 PM UTC

   Kustomer has identified an event that is causing unresponsiveness in AIC/AIR. Our team is working directly with our database provider in order to implement a resolution for this event. Please expect additional updates within the next 30 minutes, please reach out to Kustomer Support via Kustomer.com for any further questions or updates.

4. identified Mar 19, 2026, 04:58 PM UTC

   Kustomer has identified an event affecting PROD 1 that may cause failing Kustomer AI-Agent features. Our team is currently working to implement a resolution. Please expect further updates within the next 30 minutes, and reach out to Kustomer support at [email protected] if you have additional questions or concerns.

5. identified Mar 19, 2026, 05:34 PM UTC

   Kustomer has identified an event affecting PROD 1 that may result in failures with Kustomer AI Agent features. Our team is still actively working to implement a resolution. Please expect further updates within the next 30 minutes, and feel free to reach out to Kustomer Support at [email protected] if you have any additional questions or concerns.

6. monitoring Mar 19, 2026, 05:52 PM UTC

   Kustomer has implemented an update to address an event affecting Prod 1 that caused failures with Kustomer's AI features. Our team is currently monitoring this update to ensure the issue is fully resolved. Please expect further updates within the next 30 minutes, and reach out to Kustomer support at [email protected] if you have additional questions or concerns.

7. resolved Mar 19, 2026, 06:29 PM UTC

   Kustomer has resolved an event affecting Prod 1 that caused failures with Kustomer's AI features. After careful monitoring, our team has determined that all affected areas are now fully restored. Please reach out to Kustomer support at [email protected] if you have additional questions or concerns.

8. postmortem Mar 27, 2026, 03:38 PM UTC

   ## Summary On March 19, 2026, some Kustomer AI features were unavailable for customers hosted in one production environment \(Prod1\). The disruption affected AI-powered responses and related AI workflows for 41 customers in our Prod 1 instance. Other production environments were not affected. Service was fully restored within 4 hours, and the platform is operating normally. ## Root cause The incident was caused by a production database index change that was introduced during a service deployment. That change caused database performance to degrade significantly for a high-traffic dataset used by our AI services. As performance deteriorated, dependent services were unable to start or process requests normally, which led to broad disruption across affected AI features. Recovery was prolonged by duplicate records created during the incident window, which complicated restoration of normal database constraints and required additional remediation before services could be brought back cleanly. ## Timeline All times below are in EDT \(UTC-4\) on March 19, 2026. * **~10:27 AM** — A production deployment introduced a database index change that degraded performance for AI-related services. * **~10:37 AM** — Customer impact was confirmed and incident response began. * **~10:42 AM** — We published a public status update and began active mitigation. * **~11:37 AM** — We identified the primary cause and focused recovery on database stability and service restoration. * **~12:10 PM** — After scaling database capacity and reducing load, service recovery began. * **~1:43 PM** — AI services began recovering and queued work started draining. * **~2:19 PM** — Backlogged work had been processed and core functionality was restored. * **Later that afternoon** — Follow-up cleanup was completed and normal safeguards were re-applied. ## Lessons and improvements We take this incident seriously and are making changes to reduce the likelihood of recurrence. * We are tightening how database schema and index changes are deployed in production, including stronger pre-deployment validation and safer rollout sequencing. * We are removing index-management behavior from service startup paths where it can create unnecessary risk during deployment. * We are improving monitoring and alerting so service health failures and database stress are detected earlier. * We are refining incident response procedures, access readiness, and operational runbooks to speed mitigation during future incidents. * We are reviewing capacity and resilience safeguards for this part of the platform to better handle abnormal database load.