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?

Engineering routed SMS traffic through the secondary messaging provider while they worked 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.