Is it my internet, my account, or is the AI down?

By Joe Balewski · July 13, 2026

When an AI tool breaks mid-task, there are only three suspects: your internet, your account, or their servers. You can rule out two of them in about a minute.

Step 1: Is your internet fine?

Open any other website. If it loads normally, your connection is fine and you can stop blaming your wifi. (If nothing loads, there's your answer — and none of the AI status pages will load either, so the rest of this guide can wait.)

Step 2: Is the service down?

Check the live page for your tool: ChatGPT · Claude · Gemini · Copilot. Each one reads the provider's official status feed every 75 seconds. If it says there's an incident, it's them. You're done — see what to do while it's down.

Step 3: If the service says it's fine but it's broken for you

This is the uncommon case, and it's usually one of these:

• You hit a usage limit. Messages like "you've reached your limit" or "too many requests" aren't outages — they're caps, and they reset on their own. The message usually says when.
• A stale session. This is the one time logging out and back in is actually worth trying.
• A payment or account issue. Check for a banner or email from the provider — billing problems announce themselves.
• A slow rollout catching you first. Status pages lag reality by a few minutes sometimes. If it worked an hour ago, you changed nothing, and it's suddenly erroring — wait five minutes and check the status page again before doing anything drastic.

The honest default

If it worked recently and you didn't change anything, the odds strongly favor them. These services break in small ways more often than their status pages admit, and the problems usually fix themselves before you'd finish troubleshooting. Check the status, switch tools if you're in a hurry, and don't take it personally.