Is ElevenLabs down? How to tell, and what to do next

The fastest answer is the ElevenLabs status page on isuptime, which reads ElevenLabs' own feed every few minutes and says what it currently reports.

The more useful answer is that ElevenLabs is two products sharing a status page, and the difference matters more here than at most providers. One half generates audio from models. The other half carries audio over phone networks it does not own. They break for unrelated reasons, on unrelated schedules, and a green indicator on one tells you nothing about the other.

What ElevenLabs actually reports on

Eleven components, each with its own status:

Read the incident history and the split is obvious. "Elevated error rates on TTS, STT APIs" is a model-path incident. "SIP call failures", "Inbound Twilio calls experiencing intermittent connection failures" and "WhatsApp outbound message failures" are telephony-path incidents — and two of those three name a company that is not ElevenLabs.

The half that is not really ElevenLabs

A voice agent that answers phone calls has a dependency chain running well past the model: your app, ElevenLabs, a SIP provider or Twilio, a carrier, and the caller's network. ElevenLabs posts an incident when its side of that chain breaks, including — to its credit — when the trouble starts at a partner. But the chain has links whose failures never appear on any ElevenLabs page at all.

The practical consequence: if calls are failing, check Twilio before you conclude anything about ElevenLabs. Two green status pages and a broken call is a completely ordinary situation, because carrier-level problems are regional, silent, and published by nobody.

"Quality" is a status component, and that is unusual

Most providers report up or down. ElevenLabs publishes a component for output quality, which is an admission that a voice model has a failure mode between working and broken: it responds, on time, with the right shape of data, and the audio is wrong. Robotic, clipped, wrong prosody, wrong language.

That failure is invisible to every check you are likely to have. Your monitoring sees a 200 and a plausible payload length. Your users hear something they will not sit through. If you build on voice, this is the failure worth building a check for — sample the output, not just the status code.

Five failures that impersonate an ElevenLabs outage

These account for most of the times the status page is green and you are still stuck.

1. Concurrency, not capacity. Voice plans cap how many generations you can have in flight at once, which is a different limit from requests per minute. A burst hits the concurrency ceiling and the extra requests are rejected while the platform is entirely healthy. It looks like an outage precisely when you are busiest.

2. Quota exhaustion mid-month. Character and credit budgets run out silently and turn every subsequent call into an error. Nothing is broken; you have simply spent the month.

3. A voice or model that moved. Voice ids are not eternal and models get deprecated. A request naming something that no longer exists fails permanently, and no amount of retrying or refreshing the status page changes that.

4. Region and data residency. ElevenLabs runs residency-scoped deployments, and its own history includes an EU-residency incident that did not touch other regions — "Increased Error Rate in US Region" is the mirror image. If your account is pinned to one region, an incident in another is not yours, and the aggregate indicator will not make that distinction for you.

5. Streaming that dies in the middle. Real-time audio is a long-lived connection through your infrastructure, and proxies, load balancers and serverless timeouts kill long-lived connections routinely. A stream that always fails at the same elapsed time is being cut by something with a stopwatch, and that something is usually yours.

Is it ElevenLabs, or is it just me?

A decision procedure that resolves this quickly:

1. Check the status page and find which component is flagged. TTS degraded with telephony green is a very different afternoon from the reverse.
2. Retry one request by hand, outside your application, with a known-good voice id. If that works, the problem is in your code path.
3. Check the audio, not just the status code. For quality failures, nothing else will tell you.
4. Check your usage dashboard for concurrency and quota before assuming an incident.
5. If calls are the problem, check the carriers — Twilio first, then whether failures cluster by destination country.
6. Check whether anything else is broken. If several unrelated providers are reporting problems at the same moment, the common cause is more likely upstream — a cloud region or a CDN — than each of them independently having a bad day.

That last step is most of why isuptime reads 102 status pages on one schedule rather than one at a time. Shared timing across unrelated providers is real evidence of a common cause. It is never proof of one.

What to do before it happens

Voice is less forgiving than text about degradation, because the deadline is a human conversation. Two hundred extra milliseconds is invisible in a chat completion and audible in a phone call.

So the preparation that actually helps is not a second vendor you will never finish wiring up. It is a hard timeout on generation with a pre-recorded fallback line, so an agent that cannot speak says something rather than nothing; a synthetic check that listens to its own output; and an escalation path off the agent and onto a human or a voicemail, chosen deliberately rather than discovered mid-incident.

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Live ElevenLabs status on isuptime is read from ElevenLabs' own public feed on a fixed schedule and shows what ElevenLabs is currently reporting, with the timestamp of the check. It is not an independent test of whether ElevenLabs works for you — here is exactly what it can and cannot tell you.