Service Incident - April 22nd, 2025 - Pod 17|Department spaces forced rollout: Error when assigning ticket "Assignee is not a member of the brand"

SUMMARY

After the rollout of department spaces feature on Pod 17 on April 21st, some customers received “Assignee is not a member of the brand“ error while assigning the tickets to agents with no brands. This affected both manual and automated assignments. 

Timeline

April 22, 2025 10:29 AM UTC | April 22, 2025 03:29 AM PT

We have received reports of customers getting an error "Assignee is not a member of the brand” when logging in to Zendesk Support. Our engineers have already been engaged and are working on mitigating the issue. We apologize for this inconvenience. We will provide the next update in 30 minutes.

April 22, 2025 11:06 AM UTC | April 22, 2025 04:06 AM PT

We are currently investigating the issue in Zendesk Support where customers are getting an error “Assignee is not a member of the brand”. Our engineers are working on the mitigation and testing the fix. We appreciate your patience on this issue and we will provide updates as it becomes available.

April 22, 2025 12:30 PM UTC | April 22, 2025 05:30 AM PT

We continue to investigate this issue in Zendesk Support where customers are getting an error “Assignee is not a member of the brand”. We have received several feedback that the workaround provided has worked, and our engineers are working with the other customers that are still having some issues. We appreciate your patience on this and we will provide necessary updates as it becomes available.

April 23, 2025 12:45 AM UTC | April 22, 2025 05:45 PM PT

Our team is currently testing a fix for the issue impacting some agents using Zendesk Support on Pod 17. If your agents are experiencing issues viewing tickets or they receive the error "Assignee is not a member of the brand", they may be impacted by this issue. A temporary workaround is to manually add your affected agents to the appropriate brands in your account to regain access to tickets. Admins can search for the agents using the following instructions and make brand membership edits in bulk: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408843830938#topic_prc_1qj_35b. We will provide another update when we have more to share. Thank you for your patience during this extended issue.

April 23, 2025 03:30 AM UTC | April 22, 2025 08:30 PM PT

We are pleased to inform you that our team has successfully tested and deployed a fix for the issue impacting some agents using Zendesk Support on Pod 17. If you encounter any further issues please reach out to us via Messaging at support.zendesk.com . We will continue monitoring our systems and your feedback before providing a final update. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we worked to resolve this issue.

April 24, 2025 12:01 AM UTC | April 23, 2025 05:01 PM PT

We are happy to report that the error impacting ticket access for some Support customers on Pod 17 is now resolved. Please take note of this announcement about the Department Spaces feature rollout if any concerns remain: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/9169326941850 (and please reach out to our support team via Messaging at support.zendesk.com if you have further questions). Thanks for your patience while we worked through this issue.

Root Cause Analysis

This incident was caused by permission checks/validations for ticket assignment upon saving which were not updated to allow for this exception path. Additionally, there were no alerts received which contributed to prolonging this issue.

Resolution

To fix this issue, our engineers provided a manual workaround of assigning the agents to their appropriate brands, and further deployed a fix that enabled the automated assigning of tickets to the agents.

Remediation Items

1. Add new testing plans to mitigate the gap and revisit current test coverage.
2. Add Anomaly alert for “agent not part of brand” error to detect increased activity.
3. Review and enhance overall permission validation testing and rollout processes to prevent similar gaps.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

For current system status information about Zendesk and specific impacts to your account, visit our system status page. You can follow this article to be notified when our post-mortem report is published. If you have additional questions about this incident, contact Zendesk customer support.