Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
Social connections break regularly, and Zendesk emails every admin when it happens. Reauthorising is the fix in most cases.
Why has our Facebook or Instagram channel stopped working?
- An email to every admin on the account, headed Attention required: Facebook Page, [name], is no longer authorized. That is the one signal you do get, so check which mailbox it lands in.
- Messages stop becoming tickets, with nothing shown in the ticket view itself.
- A reauthorisation notice in Admin Center.
- Agents can see a conversation but cannot reply.
- A customer says they messaged you days ago.
Resolution steps
1. Reauthorise the connection
The fix in most cases, and there is a documented way to do it that avoids the usual mess.
- Open a private or incognito window.
- Sign in to both your Zendesk account and your Facebook account there.
- In Admin Center, click Channels in the sidebar and select Messaging.
- Reconnect the channel.
The private window is the point: it stops a Facebook session you forgot you had from connecting the wrong page. If you get a Page not found while reauthorising, clear the browser cache and try again.
2. Check who still administers the page
Linking a page needs an admin or editor on the Facebook side, and an admin on the Zendesk side. If the person who connected it has left or lost those rights, somebody who has them has to reconnect.
3. Check the permissions Meta is asking for
Meta changes what it requires. A reauthorisation that appears to succeed but omits a permission leaves the channel half working, which is why messages arrive but replies fail.
4. Check Instagram's message access
For Instagram specifically, message access can be switched off in the Instagram settings independently of the Zendesk connection.
5. Some conversations and not others
Where most messages become tickets and particular ones do not, the connection is fine. That pattern points at the individual customer having disabled access by third-party apps on their own account, which is nothing you can change from your side.
Why it keeps happening
Not expiry, which is the usual assumption. The documented causes are specific: the admin who authorised the page revoked their Facebook session, which happens when they change their password or sign out of a device after a password change, or somebody removed permissions for the Zendesk Facebook app to manage the pages or read the page messages.
That makes the breakage predictable. A password reset by the colleague who set this up will take the channel down, and nobody connects the two events.
What you can do is check the channel periodically rather than waiting to be told. Somebody sending a test message to each social channel weekly catches it within days.
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