Quiet hours — Recipient-local send window
What is Quiet hours?
Quiet hours are the local time window — commonly overnight, such as 9pm to 8am in the recipient's time zone — during which a business refrains from sending marketing calls or texts, either because a law like the TCPA restricts it or because the organization chose the control. Because recipients span many time zones, the window evaluates against recipient-local time, resolved from an explicit timezone hint or the number's area code or country prefix, and a compliant sender holds the message until the window ends rather than dropping it.
More detail
Quiet-hours rules vary by jurisdiction — both the specific window and which message categories are covered (marketing typically more restricted than transactional) — so a global sender needs jurisdiction-aware rules, not one fixed window.
A message queued to send during a recipient's quiet hours is typically held and delivered automatically once the window ends, rather than being dropped or requiring manual rescheduling.
In Orbit, quiet hours beyond the fixed federal voice window are an opt-in, tenant-owned control: you enable per-channel gates in organization settings, and declare an org-wide fallback window for drip and journey campaigns — the platform default 21:00 → 09:00 applies only when a campaign row carries no window of its own. The one always-on send gate in this space is the TCPA federal voice dialing window (8am–9pm recipient-local) on automated US outbound voice.
Before rollout you can check a specific recipient against the window with the read-only quiet-hours preview endpoint: it returns whether the send would dispatch now, the recipient-local hour and the resolved timezone (explicit hint, then area-code or country-prefix lookup, then UTC), the applied window, the next permitted instant to schedule to, and the reason code behind the verdict. Voice traffic forks between the hard-blocked campaign path and the advisory ad-hoc path.
Frequently asked
- Whose time zone determines quiet hours — the sender's or the recipient's?
- The recipient's local time zone, since the restriction exists to protect the person receiving the message from being contacted late at night or early morning, regardless of what time it is where the sending business is located.
- What happens to a message queued during the quiet-hours window?
- A compliant platform holds it and delivers automatically once the recipient's window ends, returning the exact next permitted instant to schedule to, rather than sending it late or requiring manual rescheduling.
See also
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