AI Down Today

How to check if ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini is down

By Joe Balewski · July 13, 2026

There are three ways to find out whether an AI service is actually down. They don't always agree, so it helps to know what each one is good for.

1. The official status pages

Every provider runs one:

These are the source of record, but they have two quirks: they're written for engineers ("elevated error rates on the Messages API" — see our translation guide), and they can lag a few minutes behind reality, because a human at the company has to confirm the problem before the page changes.

2. Live trackers (that's us)

Our status board reads all four official feeds every 75 seconds and translates them into plain English — what's broken, since when, and what still works. Same data, no jargon, all four services on one page. If you'd rather be told than have to check, follow @aidowntoday on Bluesky with notifications on: we post when something breaks and when it's back, and we're silent the rest of the time.

3. Social search

Searching "chatgpt down" on Bluesky or X shows you, within seconds, whether thousands of other people are yelling about it. This is the fastest signal there is — users notice before status pages update — but it's also the noisiest: three annoyed posts don't make an outage.

When they disagree

A useful rule of thumb: user reports lead, status pages confirm. If social media is full of complaints but the status page says all clear, the status page is probably a few minutes behind. If the status page shows an incident but everything works fine for you — enjoy it; outages are often partial, and you're on the lucky side.