Is Unsplash Down?

No — Unsplash is up

Unsplash's status page: Operational · no open incidents
FlareWarden checks: Website reachable · 8 of 8 regions · 826 ms

Right now

The verdict is the worse of these two. How we decide

Unsplash's status page

status.unsplash.com · read 1 minute ago · checked every 3 minutes

Operational

Unsplash's components, as its status page reports them
Component	Status
API	Operational
Server Infrastructure	Operational
Search Infrastructure	Operational
CDN	Operational
Rendering	Operational
Data collection	Operational
Data processing	Operational
Stats visualization	Operational
Website	Operational

Open their status page

FlareWarden checks

api.unsplash.com from 8 regions · when you open this page (at most every 30 minutes), otherwise every 6 hours

Reachable

Regions up: 8 of 8
Response: 826 ms
Checked: 3 hours ago

By region

Ashburn reachable, 282 ms
Dallas reachable, 472 ms
Frankfurt reachable, 711 ms
Johannesburg reachable, 2349 ms
Los Angeles reachable, 988 ms
Newark reachable, 677 ms
Paris reachable, 340 ms
São Paulo reachable, 793 ms

Timing by region

Connection timing for each region that loaded the page
Region	DNS	TCP	TLS	TTFB
Ashburn	57 ms	6 ms	15 ms	266 ms
Dallas	75 ms	0 ms	3 ms	412 ms
Frankfurt	244 ms	1 ms	6 ms	531 ms
Johannesburg	206 ms	164 ms	331 ms	1977 ms
Los Angeles	331 ms	2 ms	5 ms	920 ms
Newark	298 ms	1 ms	4 ms	673 ms
Paris	30 ms	1 ms	13 ms	256 ms
São Paulo	331 ms	1 ms	4 ms	682 ms

We check that api.unsplash.com loads, not every feature behind it. Test it yourself

History

Incidents Unsplash reported

Since Oct 22, 3 days · from status.unsplash.com

Incidents: 0
Major or critical: 0
Median to resolve: —

No incidents reported in this window.

Unsplash website availability

Measured by FlareWarden · api.unsplash.com

Last 7 days: 100%
Last 30 days: 100%
Last 90 days: 100%
Avg response, 30 days: 970ms

Last 30 days

71-day clean streak

Sep 25 Today

No downtime Partial Downtime Not measurable No data

Measured by FlareWarden's own checks of api.unsplash.com from multiple regions every 6 hours. Unsplash's status page sets the verdict above when it reports trouble, but never these figures. Percentages count only checks that returned an availability answer — 71 days measured so far. A dash means that window does not yet hold enough measured days to publish a figure.

What Unsplash does

Unsplash is a stock photography library that is also a widely embedded API. Applications pull images through api.unsplash.com and serve the files themselves from images.unsplash.com, which means Unsplash is a live production dependency for a large number of sites and apps that use it for placeholder art, backgrounds and user-facing image search.

What an outage looks like

API requests to api.unsplash.com fail or time out, so image search and photo pickers inside other products return nothing. Images already referenced by URL may keep loading from the CDN while the API is unavailable, which makes a partial outage look inconsistent. Search results come back empty when the search infrastructure is affected, and the website itself fails to render or load thumbnails.

What to do about it

Check status.unsplash.com, which tracks the Backend Service, API, Server Infrastructure, Search Infrastructure, the Image Service with its CDN and rendering, and the website as separate components. Before assuming an outage, confirm you are not rate limited: Unsplash allows 50 requests per hour for applications in demo mode and 1000 per hour once approved for production, and reports remaining quota in response headers.

Is it down for everyone, or just you?

If this page says Unsplash is up but it is not loading for you, the problem is between you and them. Run a check against any URL from up to 17 cities across three regions to find out where it breaks.

Test it yourself

Related services

Unsplash outage FAQ

Is the Unsplash API down or am I rate limited?

Check the response headers before anything else. Unsplash returns your current quota in X-Ratelimit-Limit and X-Ratelimit-Remaining on every request, so a limit problem identifies itself. Demo applications are capped at 50 requests per hour and approved production applications at 1000, and hitting that ceiling looks like an outage to code that only checks whether a request succeeded.

Why do images still load when the Unsplash API is down?

They are served by different systems. Image files come from images.unsplash.com, which Unsplash lists as a separate Image Service with its own CDN and rendering components, while the API that returns photo metadata and search results is tracked on its own. Requests for image files do not even count against your API rate limit, which is a hint at how separate the two paths are.

Does an Unsplash outage break my site's images?

It depends on how you use it. A site that stored image URLs and serves them from the Unsplash CDN keeps working through an API outage. A site that calls the API on every page load to fetch a fresh image fails immediately. Caching the response rather than calling on each render is what turns an Unsplash outage into an invisible event.

Is Unsplash down for everyone or just my application?

Compare the per-region measurements on this page with status.unsplash.com. If both look healthy, the usual causes are application-specific: an expired or revoked access key, a demo application that was never promoted to production and has hit its 50-per-hour ceiling, or requests being made against the wrong base URL. The API is served from api.unsplash.com and returns JSON.

How we measure this

We request Unsplash's public endpoint every 6 hours from Fly.io regions across six continents — the most recent check ran from 8 of them. When you open this page and our last check is more than 30 minutes old, we check again on the spot; those checks update the verdict, never the availability figures.
A region counts as down only when it gets no usable HTTP response. A 403 or 429 means the origin answered and refused us, which we report as blocked, never as an outage.
A single failing region is treated as probe noise. Our checks only change their verdict when two consecutive cycles agree.
Response times average only the regions that actually served the page, so a timeout never inflates the number.
Where Unsplash publishes an official status feed we read it too, and the verdict is the worse of what it reports and what our checks see: a major outage of Unsplash itself is Down, trouble with one part of it is Degraded, problems at a few of a provider's many locations change nothing, and a security notice that marks nothing down is shown but changes nothing either. We check the feed every 3 minutes and read it again within minutes of any change to its incidents or components; a reading counts for 45 minutes after the last check that found nothing changed. The availability figures above are our measurement alone.

Get alerted when Unsplash goes down

We check Unsplash every 6 hours, and again when you open this page if that was more than 30 minutes ago. Your own monitors run as often as every 30 seconds, from up to 17 cities across three regions, and tell you the moment something breaks.

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