What “elevated error rates” and “degraded performance” actually mean
By Joe Balewski · July 13, 2026
AI status pages are written by engineers, for engineers. Here's what the phrases actually mean for someone just trying to get work done.
The severity words
| They say | It means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Elevated error rates | Some requests are failing. Yours might work, might not. | Retry. If it fails twice, come back in twenty minutes or switch tools. |
| Degraded performance | Working, but slow and flaky. | Be patient with long answers, or switch if you're in a hurry. |
| Partial outage | Down for some people or some features, fine for others. | Whether you're affected is mostly luck. Nothing on your end changes it. |
| Major outage | Down for basically everyone. | Switch tools or take a break. This is the one they fix fastest. |
The lifecycle words
Incidents also move through stages, and these tell you where you are in the story:
- Investigating — they know something's wrong and don't yet know why. Earliest, vaguest stage.
- Identified — they found the cause. Usually a good sign; a fix is coming.
- Monitoring — a fix is in, and they're watching to make sure it holds. Things may already work for you, or may still be shaky. Regressions happen at exactly this stage, which is why we don't post "it's fixed" until they call it resolved.
- Resolved — over. If it's still broken for you after this, reload once — you may be holding onto a stale session.
One phrase that isn't an outage
"You've reached your usage limit" or "too many requests" is not the service being down — it's a cap on your account, and it resets on its own. The status page will look clean because nothing is broken. Annoying, but different problem. If you hit limits often, that's the actual signal to keep a second AI tool in rotation — the caps don't travel between them.
Want the current answer instead of the theory? The live board shows all four services right now, in these plain terms.