Is Unsplash Down?

No — Unsplash is up

Reachable from all 8 checked regions

Average response time: 915ms

Last checked 2 hours ago · checks run every 6 hours

Official status page: https://status.unsplash.com

Unsplash uptime

100%

Last 7 days

100%

Last 30 days

100%

Last 90 days

959ms

Avg response, 30 days

Measured from multiple regions every 6 hours. Percentages count only checks that returned an availability answer — 9 days measured so far. A dash means that window does not yet hold enough measured days to publish a figure.

30-day history

9-day clean streak

Jul 25 Today

No downtime Partial Downtime Not measurable No data

Reachability by region

Each region runs its own request from a different part of the world. A service can be up for one continent and down for another, which is usually the first sign of a routing or CDN problem.

ams

596ms

DNS 43ms TCP 1ms TLS 5ms TTFB 433ms

arn

1151ms

DNS 248ms TCP 0ms TLS 4ms TTFB 935ms

bom

1221ms

DNS 134ms TCP 4ms TLS 10ms TTFB 806ms

cdg

581ms

DNS 34ms TCP 1ms TLS 6ms TTFB 332ms

dfw

698ms

DNS 89ms TCP 0ms TLS 3ms TTFB 636ms

ewr

969ms

DNS 227ms TCP 6ms TLS 16ms TTFB 949ms

sjc

413ms

DNS 151ms TCP 1ms TLS 4ms TTFB 295ms

syd

1299ms

DNS 193ms TCP 0ms TLS 3ms TTFB 880ms

yyz

807ms

DNS 65ms TCP 0ms TLS 3ms TTFB 772ms

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 all 18 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 — 8 of them answered the most recent check.
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. We only change the 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. An all-clear from the vendor can soften an unconfirmed degradation; a vendor-declared outage only worsens our verdict when our own checks corroborate it.

Get alerted when Unsplash goes down

This page refreshes every 6 hours. Your own monitors run as often as every 30 seconds, from the same 18 regions, and tell you the moment something breaks.

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