Issue Discovered - Service disruption in All Regions – SMS Notification to the US and Canada

Update timeline

1. investigating Sep 21, 2026, 06:14 PM UTC

   xMatters has identified an issue with xMatters SMS Notification for some clients in All Regions to numbers in the United States and Canada from our short code 87961. We have failed over to our secondary short code 66936. We are currently investigating the issue and will update as information becomes available. If you are also experiencing issues, or if you're not sure whether this issue impacts your service, please contact xMatters Client Assistance at https://support.xmatters.com/hc/en-us/requests/new - our support agents are waiting to help.

2. monitoring Sep 21, 2026, 06:41 PM UTC

   All SMS traffic to the US and Canada is now being delivered through our secondary short code 66936. We are currently monitoring the situation to ensure the implementation is stable and that all services are restored.

3. resolved Oct 16, 2026, 04:03 PM UTC

   The short code issue has been addressed, and all SMS notifications to Canada and the United States are now being delivered from our 87961 short code. Thank you for your patience while we addressed this matter.

4. postmortem Oct 16, 2026, 04:24 PM UTC

   **What happened?** On September 21st, 2026, customers reported an issue to xMatters Client Assistance where SMS messages were failing to send to end users in North America. **Why did it happen?** The SMS delivery failures occurred because the short code used to send SMS messages became unavailable. The system should have automatically routed failed messages through the secondary messaging provider. However, the specific error returned for these failures did not trigger the configured failover process, causing disrupted SMS delivery to end users in the US and Canada. **How did we respond?** Once Engineering identified the SMS delivery issue, they initiated the Major Incident Management process and began removing the affected short code from the messaging configuration. During this process, Engineering encountered additional issues that prevented the system from automatically switching SMS traffic to the secondary messaging provider. Engineering manually intervened to complete the switch to the secondary provider and restore SMS delivery. After service recovered, Engineering monitored the system to confirm that SMS delivery was operating normally. **What are we doing to prevent it from happening again?** The affected short code remains unavailable, so Engineering continues to route SMS traffic through the secondary messaging provider while they work to restore the previous primary short code. Engineering is also addressing the failover behavior that prevented the system from automatically switching providers when this specific error occurred. These improvements to the process will reduce the risk of a similar short code issue disrupting SMS delivery in the future.