Okta experienced a minor incident on November 12, 2025 affecting okta-emea.com cell 1 and okta.com cell 1 and 1 more component, lasting 75d. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- resolved Nov 12, 2025, 07:40 PM UTC
Our Engineering team became aware of delivery delays in SMS MFA affecting US customers across all cells. Okta continues to monitor the current situation with our third-party provider. We recommend using alternative verification methods at this time.
- resolved Nov 12, 2025, 08:56 PM UTC
Our third-party vendor is making continuous progress on resolving the SMS delivery issues. Okta has also deployed additional safeguards on our platform to mitigate the impact. We will maintain active monitoring until we confirm the issue is fully resolved.
- resolved Nov 14, 2025, 01:24 AM UTC
After monitoring for an extended period, we confirmed that the issue has not reoccurred. A root cause analysis (RCA) will be posted here within five business days. We sincerely apologize for the impact this had on you and your users.
- resolved Nov 19, 2025, 10:17 PM UTC
Timing: Incident start: November 12, 2025, at 6:50 AM PST Incident resolved: November 12, 2025, at 12:50 PM PST Detection: Okta monitoring detected a significant decline in SMS deliverability rates, coinciding with customer reports of users not receiving SMS-based one-time passcodes (OTPs). Our third-party vendor subsequently updated their status page, confirming delivery delays to multiple networks in the United States. Impact: A subset of Okta customers experienced failures when attempting to receive SMS OTPs on their first attempt during the incident window. Although the initial delivery would fail, Okta offers the option to retry sending the SMS OTP, which is handled by a secondary provider. To leverage this secondary provider, end users were required to manually click the “Resend” button after the initial send failure. Users who performed this action were able to successfully receive their OTPs and authenticate. Root Cause: Okta’s primary third-party telephony provider experienced a service outage within their United States SMS delivery infrastructure. This outage caused deliverability rates for SMS messages routed through this provider to drop below acceptable thresholds. Remediation Steps: Okta Engineering updated the telephony configuration to swap our primary provider with our secondary provider for messages sent to US numbers. This change, completed at 12:50 PM PST, routed all new SMS traffic away from the impacted provider, restoring deliverability for first-attempt SMS requests. This configuration remained in place until the third-party vendor confirmed the resolution of their infrastructure issues and testing confirmed that deliverability rates were restored.