Is Cohere Down? How to Check Cohere API Status in 2026

How to Check If Cohere Is Down

1. Check the Official Cohere Status Page

Cohere's status page at status.cohere.com tracks each API component separately: the Chat API, Generate API, Embed API, Classify API, Rerank API, and the developer dashboard. Check here first — it tells you whether a specific API is degraded or if everything is down.

Subscribe to email notifications on the status page to get proactive incident alerts instead of discovering outages when your app starts failing.

2. Test the Cohere API Directly

Test the Chat API with a minimal request to isolate the issue:

# Test the Chat/Command API
curl https://api.cohere.com/v2/chat \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $COHERE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "command-r-plus-08-2024",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "ping"}]
  }'

# Test the Embed API separately
curl https://api.cohere.com/v2/embed \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $COHERE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "embed-v4.0",
    "texts": ["test"],
    "input_type": "search_query"
  }'

A 200 confirms the API is working. A 503 indicates an outage. A 429 means rate limiting — check your token usage in the Cohere dashboard.

3. Check If It's the Embed API or Chat API

Cohere's Embed API and Chat/Command API run on separate infrastructure. If your RAG pipeline is broken, test both endpoints independently. Your vector embeddings might be failing while chat generation continues working (or vice versa). This is a common source of confusion — users assume the entire platform is down when only one API is affected.

4. Monitor in Real Time with API Status Check

API Status Check monitors Cohere's Chat and Embed endpoints continuously. Get Slack, email, or PagerDuty alerts within seconds of any degradation.

Why Does Cohere Go Down?

Cohere's enterprise focus means it prioritizes uptime, but outages still happen for these common reasons:

• Model Deployment Updates: When Cohere releases a new Command or Embed model version (command-r-plus updates, embed-v4, etc.), rolling deployments can temporarily increase latency or cause brief request failures as old model serving instances are replaced.
• Embed API Overload: The Embed API is Cohere's highest-volume endpoint — many teams run large document indexing jobs that can create sudden traffic spikes. Batch embedding jobs from multiple enterprise customers can overwhelm serving capacity simultaneously.
• Multi-Cloud Infrastructure Issues: Cohere runs on AWS, GCP, and Azure. Cloud provider incidents in specific regions can affect Cohere's availability in those regions, even if other regions remain operational.
• Rate Limit Enforcement Changes: Cohere periodically updates rate limits for different API tiers. Sudden policy changes can look like outages to teams whose integrations hit new limits unexpectedly.
• Fine-Tuned Model Serving: Teams using Cohere's custom fine-tuned model hosting may experience outages specific to their model endpoint that don't appear on the public status page.

Cohere Troubleshooting Checklist

Cohere API Alternatives

For production RAG pipelines, plan your fallback strategy before an outage happens:

Cohere Uptime & Outage History

Cohere's enterprise positioning means it invests heavily in reliability, maintaining strong uptime SLAs for paid customers. Most public incidents have been brief — under an hour — and typically affect specific API endpoints rather than the entire platform. The Embed API historically experiences more incidents than the Chat API due to higher request volumes from bulk indexing workflows.

For real-time uptime monitoring and incident history, check API Status Check's Cohere monitoring page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Don't Let Cohere Outages Break Your RAG Pipeline

A broken Embed API means your semantic search returns garbage results. A broken Command API means your AI assistant goes silent. Know about Cohere outages before your users do.