We had the same issue, FreshDesk as a whole was down,w e got gateway timeout issues on our pages, and the freshdesk support site.  I couldn't even report an issue.

Today we can't send ticket replies.  FreshDesk reliability is just going to the toilet now.  Very disappointed.

Is this still going on? And has there really been no response at all from Freshdesk?

I'm currently in the free trial period and it's very concerning to see no acknowledgment of the problem, or other response from Freshdesk.

It lasted about 1 hour, 4 days ago.  They just never acknowledged that there was any sort of issue.

They shot their servers in the amazon cloud, so they generally just push off any issue as not being their fault, its an AWS issue, etc.

Not being able to send tickets lasted about 2 hours or so, and again was not their fault, but their third party SMTP provider show as having issues.  My issue with that is this third party SMTP provider also does "email campaigns" (aka SPAM) so the helpdesk risks having legitimate emails flagged as spam since its sent from the same email servers.  Its a bad choice in my opinion to use them as the SMTP provider.

Definitely transactional email (such as from a helpdesk) should be separated from marketing email. That's pretty basic for ensuring deliverability.

If it's a question of cost, I wonder if higher tiers of service (say, Estate and above) could be moved to SMTP services with a better reputation. Of course, I wouldn't be surprised if spammers would sign up for Freshdesk just to take advantage of the good email reputation and send spam through the helpdesk. As usual, spammers are ruining it for the rest of us.

As far as the site being unresponsive, blaming things on AWS makes no sense unless there is a huge AWS issue affecting multiple availability zones.

I just moved our helpdesk to ladesk.  Done with Freshdesk, tickets being imported....

My apologies for the delay in updating this thread. We update the current health of the application, downtimes and other issues in the page http://updates.freshdesk.com/. Also this page contains historical information of the downtimes as well.

We proactively monitor our services so as to address any issues even before they surface, however for a few scenarios like an email issue it could be due to a downtime or an outage at our service provider's end which we might not have control over. However we do work closely with them to try and get it addressed asap.

With regards to switching email service providers, in higher plans we do offer custom mailbox option using which you will be able to send and receive emails using your own mail servers.