The last two days my clients messages did not reach me.

[#1]

I have been working with my client and then I heard nothing for two days. Then I get a notification of his withdrawal of the contract and the messages he was sending me for two days showed up. Is this a known issue?

[#2]

Yes, it happens from time to time.

This is always going to be a possibility. There are complexities involved in email on this scale. There is no way for Upwork to eliminate this entirely.

If you want to have timely information always, you will need to log into the website itself regularly.

[#3]

Yes I had logged on and viewed my messages for the last two days multiple
times

[#4]

Hi Kyle, 

I checked your account and can confirm that the team sent you an email notifying you that you have unread messages on your Upwork account. The email should have this for the subject headline - "You have unread messages for (contract name)." Could you please check your spam folder if the email may have gone there?

[#5]

Hi,
I have checked my inbox and the only email I received from Upwork was a
Verification Badge notification when I uploaded my passport.

[#6]

I really do not know what to do, this was my first client and it makes me look very unprofessional to not respond to my clients messages. 

[#7]

Kyle,

I'm checking this particular client's messages every four hours throughout the day. Thank goodness the problem is with only one client.

[#8]

I am having the same problem with one particular client's Upwork messages, Kyle.

I always respond to client messages the same day I receive them, but I have had to ask this client to send me a text if I don't respond quickly to a message she sends me using the Upwork system. 

[#9]

Yeah, I'm no longer getting alerts on the browser. I'm getting emails though. It's been like this for months.

[#10]

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Kyle S wrote:

I have been working with my client and then I heard nothing for two days. Then I get a notification of his withdrawal of the contract and the messages he was sending me for two days showed up. Is this a known issue?

---

It depends on who you ask. Last year I lost out on a project because messages from a prospective client re-scheduling a phone convo did not reach me for two weeks. (I was logged in every day, checking the message thread more than once a day because I've long known the email alert system is not 100% reliable at all times.) I thought she ghosted me, she thought I ghosted her and hired someone else. I have reason to believe it happened with at least one other prospect around the same time but was never able to confirm with that client what happened from her end. UW opened a ticket but could never figure out what went wrong or even verify that anything did go wrong. Since I could not produce screenshots from the days when the message was not available to me, I had no proof. As far as I know, it has not happened again although from time to time I respond to an invitation or a client responds to a proposal and after exchanging a few messages they simply disappear in the middle of the conversation. A certain amount of that goes with the territory but still, I hate knowing the system is not 100% reliable.

Years ago, the message center went down temporarily when my very first client was trying to conduct a scheduled three-way convo with me and her boss, and it was an annoying rigmarole to jump over to phone and email. (Fortunately, we had already exchanged email addresses because we were both compulsive about redundancy.) Since then, I always exchange direct contact info with new clients and tell them if I ever fail to respond via UW they should reach out to me directly. After my experience last summer, I do that with prospects as well. It can be cumbersome but as far as I know there has been no official acknowledgment from UW that this problem exists. And in fairness to the engineers, it seems like a difficult thing to track and verify -- I could not prove a negative, when I was trying to get a solution last year.