Voice conversations unavailable, 7–8 October 2026

From 19:18 UTC on 7 October to 06:53 UTC on 8 October 2026 (21:18–08:53 CEST), voice conversations on the Promethist platform did not work in our EU and US regions. Users could start a conversation, but their speech was not converted to text, so the AI agent never received what they said. Text conversations were not affected, and everything except speech recognition kept working normally. The trigger was a routine automatic payment that our speech-recognition provider, Soniox, failed to process. Our backup provider did not take over and our monitoring did not alert us, so we learned about the problem from a customer the next morning. We are sorry. This was our failure, and this report explains what happened and what we are changing.

Customer impact

• Affected: all voice conversations in the EU and US regions for 11 hours 35 minutes. The busiest period was 06:00–06:53 UTC (08:00–08:53 CEST), when morning usage started.
• What users saw: a loading indicator that never finished. The app showed no error and did not suggest switching to text.
• Not affected: text conversations, agent configuration in Promethist Studio and all other platform features. No customer data was lost or exposed.

Timeline

• 7 Oct 19:18 UTC (21:18 CEST): Soniox fails to process a routine automatic top-up of our prepaid balance, although the card has sufficient funds. The balance runs out and Soniox starts rejecting speech-recognition requests. Automatic failover to our backup provider also fails.
• 7 Oct 19:18 – 8 Oct 06:53 UTC (21:18 – 08:53 CEST): Voice conversations fail in the EU and US regions.
• 8 Oct, morning: A customer reports that voice conversations are not working.
• 8 Oct 06:53 UTC (08:53 CEST): Our team manually re-submits the payment. Soniox accepts requests again and voice conversations recover.
• 8 Oct 07:08 UTC onwards (09:08 CEST onwards): We start the incident review and agree the remediation plan below.

Why it happened

We pay Soniox through a prepaid balance that is topped up automatically by card. This top-up is a routine operation that had always worked before. On 7 October Soniox failed to process it, even though the card had sufficient funds. When the balance reached zero, Soniox stopped processing our requests. Our EU and US regions share one Soniox account balance, so both regions were affected at the same moment.

Several safeguards that should have limited the impact also failed:

• The backup provider did not take over. The platform is designed to switch to a second speech-recognition provider (Google) when the primary fails. During the incident the backup returned errors too. We are confirming the cause of the errors.
• Monitoring did not alert us. Our health checks did not cover Soniox, and the check for the backup provider had been paused. Our automated log review, which should have flagged the spike in errors, had stopped running shortly before the incident.
• Users got no error message. The app is designed to show an error when speech recognition fails. Instead it kept waiting, and users had no way to know they could continue in text.

What we are changing

We will update this report as each item is completed.

What you can do

• If voice stops responding, switch to text mode in the app. Text conversations do not depend on speech recognition.
• Follow this page for the current status of the platform.
• For questions about this incident, contact us at support.promethist.ai.

We know you rely on Promethist for conversations that matter to your people. We apologise for the disruption.