What else happens when you impersonate a user?
Blog post from WorkOS
Impersonation sessions are easy to enable through identity providers but can create broad downstream risks because applications and integrations typically treat the support engineer’s activity as if it were the customer’s. Potential consequences include misleading transactional, lifecycle, and chat notifications; inaccurate webhooks, analytics, session recordings, login timestamps, error reports, rate limits, feature-flag assignments, caches, and background jobs that lose actor context after the session ends. A recommended approach is to derive a single support-session flag from authenticated impersonator data at session creation, make it available before third-party tools initialize, and have every relevant integration consult it, while ensuring failures preserve normal behavior rather than disabling services globally. Rather than allowing operators to suppress notifications manually, applications should suppress misleading user-action alerts while providing a deliberate, independent access notification and customer-visible audit record. Effective audit trails should retain both the acting support employee and the customer identity, record the reason, and capture both session start and end. Identity providers such as WorkOS can supply impersonator metadata and session expiration, but application teams remain responsible for handling their own emails, analytics, webhooks, queues, billing, and other side effects through a deliberate pre-release review.
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