Intuit Mailchimp
View company profile →
Negligent Support: 3 Months of API Outages
As VP Engineering for a SaaS provider, I’ve endured 3 months of recurring API outages due to Mailchimp’s firewall. Despite providing detailed logs and Akamai IDs, support has been negligent: Irrelevant Troubleshooting: For a server-to-server API block, support suggests browser fixes like clearing cookies and switching browsers. Circular Logic: Requests for WAF rule criteria are ignored, preventing us from adjusting our code to comply, if at all required. Escalation Failure: They fail to involve Network Security or supervisors, even during a 97% service blackout. SaaS providers beware: Mailchimp’s automated reputation systems will blackhole your traffic, and their support is unequipped to help or escalate to anyone who can. === UPDATE (Jan 9, 2026): Performative PR vs. Private Silence Since posting this review, Mailchimp reached out publicly with a generic invitation to "understand more" by emailing their social reviews team. I responded to that request immediately. The result has been another 48 hours of total silence while our production environment remains in a state of crisis. Mailchimp’s public-facing helpfulness is a performative PR tactic rather than a genuine attempt at resolution. If you are a developer or a business owner, do not be fooled by their "friendly" public responses to negative reviews. Behind the scenes, the technical incompetence and refusal to escalate critical infrastructure failures remain unchanged. We are still waiting for a supervisor or a Security Engineer to provide the resolution we have been requesting for three months. === UPDATE (Jan 12, 2026): Reprieve is not Resolution The latest wave of blocking (Wave #8) subsided on Jan 10 after lasting 60 hours. While traffic is currently flowing, the underlying infrastructure issue remains entirely unresolved, and the risk of a 9th wave is imminent. The disconnect between Mailchimp’s PR and their Engineering is now undeniable: Passive Support: A "Social Review" agent reached out with apologies, claiming they "genuinely care" and are "monitoring" the situation. However, monitoring an outage is not the same as fixing it. Technical Silence: Despite my team providing multiple batches of Akamai Reference IDs on Jan 9 to assist their investigation, the main technical support thread has been silent for four days. Not a single Security Engineer has acknowledged this data or provided a technical update. Refusal to Whitelist: Despite this being the 8th sustained outage since October, Mailchimp still refuses to implement a manual whitelist for our production IP. They are choosing to rely on a demonstrably broken automated system rather than taking manual action to protect a legitimate partner. We are still waiting for a technical Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and a permanent whitelist. Do not let the "polite" social media responses fool you—on a technical level, the negligence continues.