Hotjar Status: How to Check If Hotjar Is Down Right Now (2026)
Updated June 2026 · 6 min read · By API Status Check
Quick Answer: Check Hotjar Status Now
Hotjar is a behavior analytics platform used by product and UX teams to understand how visitors interact with websites — through heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, and funnel analysis. A critical thing to understand when troubleshooting: data collection (recording sessions on your visitors' devices) and data playback (viewing those recordings in your dashboard) are separate infrastructure components. One can be down while the other works fine.
Three Hotjar Systems That Can Fail Independently
- • The Hotjar JS snippet running on visitor devices
- • Records mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, sessions
- • If this fails: no new heatmap/recording data captured
- • Symptom: 0 new sessions in "Last 24 hours" despite traffic
- • Hotjar's pipeline that aggregates raw data into heatmaps
- • Usually has a 1-2 hour delay even when healthy
- • If delayed: heatmaps don't update for hours/days
- • Symptom: recordings appear but heatmaps lag behind
- • The Hotjar web app at insights.hotjar.com
- • Where you view recordings, heatmaps, surveys
- • If this fails: you can't access data already collected
- • Symptom: dashboard slow/blank despite data existing
Understanding Hotjar's Status Page (status.hotjar.com)
Hotjar's official status page at status.hotjar.com tracks their main infrastructure components. Knowing which component your issue maps to tells you whether to wait for Hotjar to fix it or check your own implementation.
Data Collection
The Hotjar tracking script running on your visitors' browsers. When this degrades, no heatmap clicks or session recordings are captured. This affects all new visits — historical data already collected remains intact.
Heatmaps
The heatmap generation pipeline that aggregates click, move, and scroll data. Even when healthy, heatmaps have a natural processing delay of 1-2 hours. If degraded, existing heatmaps may stop updating or show stale data.
Recordings
Session recording capture and playback. If collection is down, new recordings aren't captured. If playback is down, existing recordings are inaccessible but not lost — they'll become visible once playback recovers.
Surveys & Feedback
Hotjar Surveys (on-page feedback widgets and NPS). These run via a separate pipeline from heatmaps and recordings. Surveys can be affected without impacting session recording, and vice versa.
Dashboard / App
The insights.hotjar.com web application. If degraded, you may see blank screens, slow loading, or errors when accessing your heatmaps and recordings — even if data collection is running normally in the background.
Integrations
Connections to Google Analytics, Optimizely, and other platforms that pass segment data into Hotjar. Integration failures cause recording segmentation to be missing or inaccurate but do not affect raw data collection.
Is It Hotjar or Your Implementation?
Most "Hotjar not working" reports turn out to be implementation issues, not outages. This quick checklist helps you tell the difference before escalating to Hotjar support:
Hotjar Script Verification (Browser Console)
# Check if Hotjar loaded on your site
window.hj !== undefined
// Returns true if Hotjar initialized correctly
# Check Hotjar version loaded
window.hj.version
# In Network tab: look for requests to
script.hotjar.com
vc.hotjar.io
// These should return 200; blocked = CSP or ad blocker
Common Reasons Hotjar Stops Recording (Not an Outage)
- 🔴 Daily session limit reached: Free and paid plans have daily session caps. When reached, Hotjar stops recording for the day. Check Settings → Recording Limits.
- 🔴 Recording suppression rules: Hotjar suppresses recordings on pages matching certain URL patterns. Check Settings → Recording → Suppression Rules.
- 🔴 Content Security Policy (CSP): Strict CSP headers can block Hotjar's scripts from loading. Check for CSP violations in your browser console.
- 🔴 Tag Manager misconfiguration: If Hotjar fires via Google Tag Manager, verify the trigger is correct and the tag is not paused. Check GTM's Preview mode to confirm it fires on your target pages.
- 🔴 Single-page application (SPA) routing: On React/Vue/Angular apps, Hotjar may not capture page changes automatically. Use the Hotjar Virtual Page Views API to manually track route changes.
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Common Hotjar Issues and What They Mean
"No new recordings in the last 24 hours"Check (1) Data Collection on status.hotjar.com, (2) your daily session limit in Settings, (3) whether your Hotjar script is loading on the page (open console, run window.hj !== undefined), and (4) suppression rules in Recording settings. A sudden drop to zero usually indicates a script loading issue, not an outage."Heatmap shows "No data" for a page with traffic"Heatmaps only capture data from the moment a heatmap is created — they don't retroactively apply to historical sessions. Also check that your heatmap's URL targeting matches the actual page URL (especially for SPAs with query strings). Allow 1-2 hours for data to process."Session recording is pixelated or showing wrong layout"Hotjar captures DOM snapshots and attempts to reconstruct pages in playback. Dynamic content (iframes, canvas elements, certain CSS) can render differently in playback. This is a known limitation, not a data loss issue. Hotjar's playback engine is not a full browser renderer."Hotjar survey not appearing on my site"Check survey trigger conditions: minimum time on page, scroll depth, exit intent, and URL targeting. Also verify the survey is in 'Live' status (not Draft or Closed) and that you haven't hit a response cap. Test in an incognito window to avoid suppression from a prior survey response."Hotjar dashboard shows "Something went wrong""A dashboard/app infrastructure issue. Check status.hotjar.com for the Dashboard component. Try a hard refresh (Ctrl+Shift+R) and clear your browser cache. If it persists for more than 15 minutes, check Hotjar's social channels for incident reports."Recordings stopped after upgrading tracking snippet"Hotjar occasionally updates their tracking snippet version. If you hardcoded an old snippet version, it may be deprecated. Re-install the current snippet from Hotjar Settings → Tracking Code. The new snippet is backward compatible.Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the official Hotjar status page?
Hotjar's official status page is status.hotjar.com. It breaks down status by component: Data Collection, Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys, and Dashboard. Subscribe to updates on the page for email notifications during incidents.
If Hotjar was down, was my data lost?
It depends on which component was affected. If Data Collection was down, sessions during that window were not recorded — that data cannot be recovered. If only the Dashboard was down, your collected data is safe and becomes accessible once the dashboard recovers. Hotjar does not retroactively fill gaps from collection outages.
How is Hotjar different from Google Analytics for outage purposes?
Google Analytics (GA4) collects aggregate pageview/event data — missing a few hours is usually acceptable. Hotjar collects session recordings and heatmaps, which require continuous collection. A Hotjar outage during a major product launch or A/B test can mean losing irreplaceable user behavior data for that specific event window.
How do I get alerts when Hotjar goes down?
Subscribe to updates at status.hotjar.com for email notifications. For proactive monitoring, set up a synthetic check on the Hotjar script URL (script.hotjar.com/[siteID]) to verify it's loading correctly on your site.
Can ad blockers cause 'Hotjar not working' issues?
Yes. Many ad blockers (uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger) block Hotjar's tracking script. This won't cause a global issue — only visitors with ad blockers will not be recorded. Check Hotjar's tracking code verification in Settings to see what percentage of visitors have Hotjar successfully loaded.
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