On 12 November, Twilio filed 13 separate incidents touching SMS, MMS, voice and email delivery across routes in North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, APAC and the Middle East. Several carry no resolution time and were still open as the latest updates were published. This was a day of route-by-route carrier delivery problems on Twilio's side, not a single outage with one cause.
Started
01:17 UTC
Duration
Lasted 1h 20m
Source
IsDown
Next time
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Affected components: Voice, North America, SMS, Latin America, Other, Voice, Latin America, SMS, Europe, SMS, APAC, MMS Long Code, North America, MMS Short Code, North America, MMS Toll-Free, North America, SMS Long Code, North America, SMS, Middle East & Africa
What happened?
Twilio's status history for the day lists 13 incidents starting at 01:17 UTC and running across 11 separate components, including SMS and MMS on long code, short code and toll-free numbers, voice in North America and Latin America, and an "Other" category covering email. The pattern is carrier-specific: SMS to AT&T in the US, to Orange in Sierra Leone, to Telenor in Pakistan, to Virgin Mobile and Claro in Colombia, to networks in France, to Brisanet in Brazil, and to Claro in Costa Rica, each filed and tracked on its own. Durations vary widely where Twilio gave a resolved time, from 6 minutes for the GCI MMS issue up to 8 hours 44 minutes for the France SMS delays, with a 90 day median across Twilio's incidents of 5 hours 54 minutes for comparison. Three incidents show no resolution on the record: the Orange Sierra Leone SMS failures, the Colombia voice one-way audio issue, the Microsoft inbox email delay, and the Claro Costa Rica receipt failures were all still open at their last logged update. The Sierra Leone incident ran from 01:43 to a monitoring update at 12:14 after Twilio said it had identified the cause and observed a recovery, but no final resolved message appears in the record. The Colombia voice issue moved from investigating at 16:53 to identified at 09:40 the next cycle, with Twilio citing a 16 hour update window and no resolution logged since. The email delay to Microsoft inboxes was attributed by Twilio to "a third-party provider dependency," with early signs of stabilisation reported but no resolved update shown. Across the 13 incidents there are 66 total status updates from Twilio. No user reports were filed during the window on record. Twilio's own update text, not ours, is the only source for cause in every case above.
Learning
UptimeRobot's own API checks stayed green throughout, with 100% uptime over 24 hours, 7 days and 30 days from probes run in the EU and North America, and this incident was not registered against those checks. That is not a contradiction: those probes test whether Twilio's API answers, and it did. The failures Twilio filed were downstream of the API, inside specific carrier routes for SMS, MMS, voice and email delivery to particular networks in particular countries. A product can call Twilio's API successfully and still have its messages sit undelivered to AT&T, Orange, Telenor or a Microsoft inbox, because the fault sits in the handoff between Twilio and that external network, not in Twilio's API responding to you. If your own monitoring only watches your endpoint and your API calls succeeding, this kind of carrier-side delay or failure will not show up until your users tell you messages never arrived. Your monitoring covers your half, UptimeRobot now watches the provider's half too, so next time you know which side broke without guessing.
