Is Unsplash Down?

No — Unsplash is up

Reachable from all 8 checked regions

Average response time: 930ms

Last checked 3 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

1017ms

Avg response, 30 days

Measured from multiple regions every 6 hours. Percentages count only checks that returned an availability answer — 58 days measured so far. A dash means that window does not yet hold enough measured days to publish a figure.

30-day history

58-day clean streak

Sep 12 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.

cdg

576ms

DNS 121ms TCP 1ms TLS 7ms TTFB 409ms

dfw

677ms

DNS 246ms TCP 0ms TLS 4ms TTFB 608ms

ewr

408ms

DNS 228ms TCP 1ms TLS 5ms TTFB 403ms

fra

787ms

DNS 68ms TCP 1ms TLS 5ms TTFB 606ms

gru

883ms

DNS 241ms TCP 1ms TLS 7ms TTFB 663ms

iad

441ms

DNS 181ms TCP 7ms TLS 17ms TTFB 424ms

jnb

2849ms

DNS 357ms TCP 169ms TLS 339ms TTFB 2440ms

lax

823ms

DNS 220ms TCP 1ms TLS 10ms TTFB 688ms

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.
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 up to 17 cities across three regions, and tell you the moment something breaks.

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