Yext Management APIs Incorrectly Returning 401 Unauthorized

Incident Report for Yext

Postmortem

Update:

As of 10 AM ET on September 9th, all missed webhooks have been reprocessed.

Summary

At approximately 3:07 PM ET on September 2nd, the Yext Management API in the US Partition began to return 401 Unauthorized errors on all requests.  This included requests to our webhook’s system and attempts to install app directory apps.

The core issue was resolved by 3:45 PM ET, but some webhook triggers and app directory installations remained unavailable until September 3rd at 10:40 AM ET.

Root Cause

A runtime dependency for a critical service was only included indirectly through another library. When the core system was deployed, updating the direct dependency, it removed the indirect inclusion of the critical runtime dependency, making the service unavailable to several user-facing systems and causing them to return errors.

Our synthetic monitoring immediately caught the issue with our management APIs, but the lack of coverage in our synthetic monitoring of our Webhooks system left failures in that system unnoticed until the following morning.

Remediation

The deployment was rolled back, allowing the service to restore communication with the rest of Yext’s systems. However, the Webhooks system was not restarted to restore communication until the following morning.  Missed webhooks are being reprocessed and we anticipate reprocessing to complete by 12PM ET on September 9th, 2025.

Going forward, Yext will add synthetic monitoring for the Webhooks system. Additionally, Yext will remove the impacted system from the hot path of user-facing requests and improve its dependency management.

Posted Sep 08, 2025 - 13:57 EDT

Resolved

This incident has been resolved.
Posted Sep 02, 2025 - 19:35 EDT

Investigating

We are investigating reports of our APIs returning 401 Unauthorized errors for valid api keys.
Posted Sep 02, 2025 - 15:27 EDT
This incident affected: Knowledge Graph (Content API, Management API).