API Reliability Report 2026: Our Data Featured on Nordic APIs

We're excited to share that Nordic APIs — one of the most respected publications in the API ecosystem — has published a comprehensive analysis of our API monitoring data.

The article, API Reliability Report 2026: Uptime Patterns Across 215+ Services, digs into the incident data we've been tracking since late 2025 across more than 215 services spanning cloud infrastructure, AI, payments, developer tools, and communications.

Key Findings

AI APIs Are the Least Reliable Category

The single clearest finding from our data: AI APIs are significantly less reliable than mature SaaS categories.

• Stripe operated at an estimated 99.99% uptime
• OpenAI ran at approximately 99.76% overall, with API components dipping to roughly 98.89% during one stretch
• Anthropic showed frequent short-duration incidents scoped to specific models

OpenAI logged 11 incidents in 28 days in January 2026 — one every two and a half days. The cause is structural: AI companies are simultaneously scaling inference infrastructure, launching new models, and handling demand curves that simply didn't exist two years ago.

Cloud Outages Have Massive Blast Radius

While cloud providers had fewer incidents than AI services, when they did go down, the impact was devastating:

• AWS DynamoDB (October 2025): A DNS race condition cascaded across us-east-1 into 141 affected services, including Atlassian's Jira and Confluence for 22 hours
• Cloudflare (November 2025): A single bug in Bot Management took down thousands of websites, including portions of X, OpenAI, and Downdetector itself
• Google Cloud (June 2025): A bad automated update to the quota system propagated globally, affecting 76 services

Payments Are Rock Solid

Payment APIs were the quietest category in our monitoring window. Stripe's status page was essentially empty across the entire period. When payment incidents occurred — Square and Shopify each had brief disruptions — they resolved quickly.

This makes sense: payment processors have spent over a decade hardening mission-critical infrastructure where downtime directly costs money.

Resolution Time Distribution

• Median resolution: approximately 90 minutes across all incidents
• Most incidents cleared within 2 hours
• Multi-day incidents were rare but devastating (Azure: 50 hours, OpenAI Sora: 22 days)

The distribution is heavily right-skewed — planning for the median leaves you unprepared for tail events.

What This Means for Developers

If you're building on third-party APIs, here's what our data suggests:

1. Monitor dependencies independently — status pages lag reality, sometimes by tens of minutes. Independent monitoring gives you signal before your users file tickets.

2. Implement circuit breakers — when an upstream API starts failing, stop sending traffic. A breaker that trips after five consecutive failures prevents cascading a partial upstream failure into a full downstream outage.

3. Design multi-provider fallback for AI — given current reliability gaps, if you call OpenAI, have an Anthropic or open-source fallback tested and ready.

4. Know your composite SLA — five services at 99.9% each yield a composite availability of 99.5%, which translates to over four extra hours of downtime per year.

Protect Your Stack

Based on these findings, here are the tools we recommend for API-dependent teams:

📊 Monitor your dependencies proactively. Status pages lag reality by 10-30 minutes. Better Stack gives you real-time uptime monitoring, incident management, and log analysis — catch outages before your users do.

🔐 Rotate credentials fast during incidents. The AWS DynamoDB outage cascaded partly because recovery required credential rotations across 141 services. 1Password makes it instant — store, rotate, and inject API keys securely.

Try API Status Check

We built API Status Check because developers deserve better visibility into the services they depend on. Our free dashboard monitors 215+ APIs in real-time, and our alert system notifies you within 60 seconds of detected outages.

Check API Status Now →

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Read the full analysis on Nordic APIs: API Reliability Report 2026: Uptime Patterns Across 215+ Services