Zendesk blocked in China?

Hi Søren

China is China and there is not always a transparent logic for what gets through the great firewall of china. I can't tell you your Zendesk is being blocked though - I just had my brother (in Shanghai) try to access our Zendesk without a VPN, and he got through just fine!?

Have you tried to traceroute or something similar from his location to Zendesk? Maybe you can see where it gets blocked,

Hi Carsten, thanks for the quick reply. 

We will try that. 

Hi Carsten,

We can not make our clients to use a VPN all the time, and visit Zendesk in China is sometimes extremely slow.

I think it would be nice if there are some Zendesk data centers in China, which would improve the situation.

For now, Is there any suggestion?

Hi Jeff, 

I commented on the other thread you posted in, but we will be reaching out to you in a ticket to get more details and troubleshoot. 

another issue our end users in China are experiencing is, the live chat widget is very hard to connect with. Sometimes the widget is missing and if you are lucky, it will appear but users are only told to leave a message, although the entire team is online. What could be the workaround on this?

Hello Maurice,

We do not have any data centers, cloud infrastructure, or service endpoints within mainland China. However, that does not mean that our services do not support customers and end-users within China.

We also do not have any restrictions on the use of our services differentiated for anyone in China. Customers within China have experienced issues at times with the ability to reach Zendesk services and other services outside of China for various reasons. That said, Zendesk Chat works but it is hard to guarantee the quality of service as China dynamically changes what they block. There are also some issues when customers use a Chinese network and this is related to the Great Firewall of China. In general, it means that Zendesk Chat will most-likely work in China, but we cannot guarantee the quality of the service.

Please let me know if you have any questions or additional concerns! :)

Our customer support in China is not able to login to Zendesk without using a VPN, they have tried our internal wifi, external wifi, via their mobile devices and to a proxy to Hong Kong. This appears to have become a problem over the past week.

Is there anything we can do to rectify this?

Are others experiencing the same issue?

Same with us Dave, it's unstable and our CN support team would have to login to VPN in order to connect but in many cases, they are being kicked out frequently as well (even with VPN on).

This is quite bothersome for us because at the moment most of our team is in China. So all of them need to use a VPN and our customers in China cannot access our help center. Hope some work can be done on this regard. 

We are keeping an eye on this issue. We plan to let our tesh support team to use ZenDesk which is subcribed by the headquarter office in Sydney, Australia. ZenDesk should do something about this issue. One of our products is Embroidery Web API, which is hosted on the cloud outside mainland China. For the customers inside mainland China, the call and respond to and from Embroidery Web API is very slow and unstable due to GFW. Since we do not want to host our Embroidery Web API inside mainland China, we hired a data traffic tunnel from Alibaba Cloud to resolve this issue. It is an idea to share with ZenDesk.