Cohere Status: How to Check If Cohere API Is Down Right Now (2026)
Updated June 2026 · 6 min read · API Status Check
Quick Answer
Check Cohere API status at status.cohere.com (official) for real-time API and service status. You can also test the API directly at api.cohere.com/v1/chat.
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The Official Cohere Status Page
Cohere maintains an official status page at status.cohere.com. It tracks status across Cohere's API surface:
What Each Cohere Status Means
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Try Better Stack Free →Cohere API for Production: Resilience Patterns
Cohere is used in production RAG pipelines, enterprise search, and AI applications. Here is how to build resilience against Cohere API outages:
Implement Exponential Backoff for API Calls
Cohere API errors during degraded performance are often transient. Implement exponential backoff with jitter: start with a 1-second delay, double each retry, add random jitter (±20%), up to a maximum of 60 seconds. Most partial Cohere outages resolve within a few minutes.
# Python retry pattern for Cohere API
import time, random
def cohere_with_retry(fn, max_retries=4):
for attempt in range(max_retries):
try:
return fn()
except Exception as e:
if attempt == max_retries - 1:
raise
delay = (2 ** attempt) + random.uniform(0, 1)
time.sleep(min(delay, 60))
continueConfigure a Fallback Model Provider
For production applications, configure a fallback AI provider. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral offer compatible chat APIs. Use a circuit breaker pattern: if Cohere returns 3 consecutive errors within 60 seconds, route to your fallback for 5 minutes, then probe Cohere again. This avoids user-facing errors during Cohere incidents.
Cache Embeddings Aggressively
If your RAG pipeline re-embeds the same documents repeatedly, cache embeddings in your vector database. During a Cohere Embed outage, your retrieval pipeline can still function using cached embeddings — only new document ingestion is blocked. Use a content hash as the cache key so you only re-embed when documents change.
Cohere on AWS Bedrock and Azure
Cohere Command R and Embed models are available on AWS Bedrock and Azure AI Foundry. These cloud-provider deployments have independent availability from the direct Cohere API. If you have workloads with strict uptime requirements, using Bedrock/Azure as your primary endpoint and api.cohere.com as a backup (or vice versa) provides redundancy across two independent infrastructure stacks.
5 Ways to Check Cohere Status Right Now
Official Cohere Status Page
Visit status.cohere.com for real-time per-endpoint status. Subscribe to email notifications for instant outage alerts.
status.cohere.com →Test the Cohere API Directly
Make a quick Chat API call to verify the endpoint is responding:
# Quick Cohere API health check
curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} — %{time_total}s\n" \
-X POST https://api.cohere.com/v1/chat \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"model":"command-r","message":"hi","max_tokens":1}'
# 200 = healthy, 429 = rate limited, 503 = outageCheck Cohere Dashboard Usage
Log into dashboard.cohere.com and check the API usage and error rate graphs. A spike in error responses is often visible in your dashboard before an incident is declared on the status page.
Cohere Dashboard →Search X/Twitter
Search 'Cohere down' or 'Cohere API outage' on X. AI developers and ML engineers report Cohere API issues quickly on social media.
Search X for 'cohere api down' →Try Cohere on Bedrock/Azure
If you have Cohere on AWS Bedrock or Azure AI Foundry configured, test those endpoints. If Bedrock/Azure works but api.cohere.com fails, the issue is with Cohere's direct API, not the underlying model infrastructure.
Common Cohere API Errors During Outages
These are the errors and symptoms you'll encounter when Cohere is experiencing issues:
"HTTP 503 Service Unavailable from api.cohere.com"Cohere API is experiencing an outage or is temporarily overloaded. Check status.cohere.com. Implement exponential backoff and retry — 503s during Cohere incidents are often transient and resolve within minutes."Request timeout / no response after 30s"Cohere inference is timing out, typically during high load or partial outages. For streaming responses, this manifests as the stream starting then stalling mid-generation. Set explicit timeout values in your HTTP client and implement retry logic."HTTP 429 Too Many Requests"You have hit Cohere rate limits. During incidents, Cohere may lower effective rate limits as a protective measure. Check your usage in the Cohere Dashboard. Implement exponential backoff. Consider upgrading your Cohere plan if you are hitting limits frequently outside of incidents."HTTP 500 Internal Server Error"An unexpected error occurred on Cohere's infrastructure. Usually transient during degraded performance. Retry with backoff. If 500s persist with no incident on status.cohere.com, contact Cohere support with your request ID."embed endpoint returning empty vectors"The Embed API is experiencing a partial failure where requests succeed but return malformed embeddings. This is rare but can corrupt vector database inserts. Validate embedding dimensions (1024 for English v3) before storing. During incidents, pause batch embedding jobs."model not found / invalid model name"Verify you are using a current model name. Cohere has deprecated older model names (command, command-nightly) in favor of versioned names (command-r-08-2024, command-r-plus-08-2024). This is not an outage — update your model name in your API call.What to Do When Cohere Is Down
Immediate Response
- Verify on status.cohere.com before troubleshooting your code
- Activate fallback model provider if you have one configured
- Pause batch embedding and fine-tuning jobs — resume after recovery
- Surface a graceful error to users: "AI features temporarily unavailable"
- Subscribe to status.cohere.com if you haven't already
Long-Term Resilience
- Implement a circuit breaker pattern with automatic fallback
- Cache embeddings — re-embedding is expensive and slow to recover
- Consider Cohere on Bedrock/Azure for independent availability
- Monitor your application's Cohere error rate — it detects degradation before status.cohere.com
- Keep fallback model prompts tested — your fallback is useless if untested
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the official Cohere status page?
Cohere's official status page is at status.cohere.com. It tracks real-time health for the Chat/Generate API, Embed API, Rerank API, Classify API, Cohere Dashboard, and Fine-tuning pipeline. Subscribe to incident notifications via email for production alerting.
Is Cohere Command R available on other platforms?
Yes — Cohere Command R and Command R+ are available on AWS Bedrock (us-east-1, eu-west-1), Azure AI Foundry, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. These deployments run on the cloud providers' infrastructure and have independent availability from api.cohere.com. Bedrock and Azure typically have different (often more stable) availability characteristics for inference workloads.
How does Cohere compare to OpenAI for reliability?
Both Cohere and OpenAI are enterprise-grade AI API providers. OpenAI has more incident history due to much higher traffic volume. Cohere's API surface is smaller but focused on enterprise use cases (RAG, search, classification). For critical production workloads, both providers benefit from a fallback strategy — using a secondary provider when the primary is degraded.
Does Cohere have SLAs for uptime?
Cohere offers SLAs for enterprise customers under their Enterprise tier agreements. Standard API access does not include contractual uptime guarantees. For production workloads requiring guaranteed uptime, evaluate Cohere Enterprise contracts or use Cohere via a cloud marketplace (Bedrock, Azure) where cloud-provider SLAs may apply.
What is the difference between Cohere API downtime and rate limits?
Rate limits (HTTP 429) are not outages — they are usage caps that reset on a per-minute or per-day basis. An outage means the API is returning 500 or 503 errors regardless of usage, or is timing out entirely. If you only see 429 errors, check your usage in the Cohere Dashboard and implement backoff — you are not experiencing a downtime event.
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