Is ElevenLabs Down? How to Check ElevenLabs Status in Real-Time

Quick Answer: To check if ElevenLabs is down, visit apistatuscheck.com/api/elevenlabs for real-time monitoring, or check their official status page at status.elevenlabs.io. Common signs include TTS generation failures, voice cloning errors, rate limit issues, streaming interruptions, and slow API response times.

When your text-to-speech generation suddenly fails or voice cloning requests timeout, every second of delay impacts your production workflow. ElevenLabs powers voice generation for thousands of content creators, developers, and businesses worldwide—from podcast automation to accessibility tools. Whether you're seeing API errors, audio quality degradation, or character limit issues, knowing how to quickly verify ElevenLabs' operational status can save you critical troubleshooting time and help you make informed decisions about your audio pipeline.

How to Check ElevenLabs Status in Real-Time

1. API Status Check (Fastest Method)

The quickest way to verify ElevenLabs' operational status is through apistatuscheck.com/api/elevenlabs. This real-time monitoring service:

• Tests actual API endpoints every 60 seconds
• Shows response times and latency trends for TTS generation
• Tracks historical uptime over 30/60/90 days
• Provides instant alerts when issues are detected
• Monitors voice cloning and speech-to-speech endpoints

Unlike status pages that rely on manual updates, API Status Check performs active health checks against ElevenLabs' production endpoints, giving you the most accurate real-time picture of service availability for text-to-speech, voice cloning, and streaming APIs.

2. Official ElevenLabs Status Page

ElevenLabs maintains status.elevenlabs.io as their official communication channel for service incidents. The page displays:

• Current operational status for all services
• Active incidents and investigations
• Scheduled maintenance windows
• Historical incident reports
• Component-specific status (TTS API, Voice Library, Streaming, Projects)

Pro tip: Subscribe to status updates via email or RSS feed on the status page to receive immediate notifications when incidents occur.

3. Check Your Dashboard

If the ElevenLabs Dashboard at elevenlabs.io is loading slowly or showing errors, this often indicates broader infrastructure issues. Pay attention to:

• Login failures or timeouts
• Voice library loading errors
• Project list not displaying
• Character usage stats not updating
• API key management access issues

4. Test API Endpoints Directly

For developers, making a test API call can quickly confirm connectivity:

import requests

url = "https://api.elevenlabs.io/v1/text-to-speech/21m00Tcm4TlvDq8ikWAM"
headers = {
    "Accept": "audio/mpeg",
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
    "xi-api-key": "your_api_key_here"
}
payload = {
    "text": "API health check test",
    "model_id": "eleven_monolingual_v1",
    "voice_settings": {
        "stability": 0.5,
        "similarity_boost": 0.5
    }
}

try:
    response = requests.post(url, json=payload, headers=headers, timeout=30)
    print(f"Status: {response.status_code}, Time: {response.elapsed.total_seconds()}s")
except requests.exceptions.Timeout:
    print("ElevenLabs API timeout - possible outage")
except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e:
    print(f"API connection error: {e}")

Look for HTTP response codes outside the 2xx range, timeout errors (>30 seconds), or connection failures.

5. Monitor Community Channels

Check for reports from other users:

• ElevenLabs Discord - Real-time user discussions and incident reports
• Twitter/X - Search for "elevenlabs down" or "#elevenlabsoutage"
• Reddit r/elevenlabs - Community discussions about service issues
• GitHub Issues - Official SDK repositories may have issue reports

If multiple users are reporting the same problem simultaneously, it's likely a platform-wide issue rather than an isolated account problem.

Common ElevenLabs Issues and How to Identify Them

Text-to-Speech Generation Failures

Symptoms:

• Requests returning 500/502/503 HTTP errors
• Timeout errors after 30+ seconds
• Empty audio responses (0 bytes)
• "Failed to generate speech" error messages
• Consistent failures across different voices

What it means: When TTS generation is degraded, requests that should complete in 2-5 seconds start timing out or failing entirely. This differs from quota limits—you'll see failures even with available character balance.

Example error response:

{
  "detail": {
    "status": "internal_server_error",
    "message": "An error occurred while generating speech"
  }
}

Voice Cloning Errors

Voice cloning requires significant processing power and is often the first service affected during capacity issues:

Common problems:

• Instant Voice Cloning timeouts (>60 seconds)
• Professional Voice Cloning jobs stuck in "processing" state
• Sample upload failures
• Voice training not completing
• Cloned voice quality degradation

How to identify:

from elevenlabs import clone, Voice

try:
    voice = Voice(
        name="Test Clone",
        samples=["sample1.mp3", "sample2.mp3"]
    )
    cloned = clone(voice=voice)
except Exception as e:
    if "timeout" in str(e).lower() or "500" in str(e):
        print("Voice cloning service may be degraded")

Rate Limiting and Character Quota Issues

Normal rate limits:

• Free tier: 10,000 characters/month
• Creator tier: 30,000 characters/month
• Pro tier: 100,000 characters/month
• Scale tier: 500,000+ characters/month

Abnormal rate limiting during outages:

• 429 errors when well below quota
• Character reset not occurring at billing cycle
• Concurrent request limits triggering incorrectly
• Sudden quota consumption spikes

Error code:

{
  "detail": {
    "status": "quota_exceeded",
    "message": "You have exceeded your character quota"
  }
}

How to check: Verify your usage in the dashboard. If the API reports quota exceeded but dashboard shows available characters, there may be a sync issue during degraded service.

Audio Quality Issues

During partial outages or high load:

• Robotic or distorted audio - Processing shortcuts during overload
• Inconsistent prosody - Model inference errors
• Missing words or syllables - Audio generation truncation
• Crackling or artifacts - Streaming buffer issues
• Wrong voice characteristics - Model serving errors

Quality test code:

import hashlib
import requests

def verify_audio_quality(api_key, test_phrase="The quick brown fox"):
    """Generate audio and check if output is consistent"""
    
    results = []
    for i in range(3):
        audio = generate_tts(api_key, test_phrase)
        audio_hash = hashlib.md5(audio).hexdigest()
        results.append(audio_hash)
    
    # Identical inputs should produce identical outputs
    if len(set(results)) > 1:
        print("Warning: Inconsistent TTS output - possible quality degradation")
        return False
    return True

Streaming Interruptions

The WebSocket-based streaming API is sensitive to infrastructure issues:

Symptoms:

• WebSocket connections dropping mid-stream
• Audio chunks arriving out of order
• Latency spikes (>500ms per chunk)
• Connection refused errors
• Incomplete audio streams

Streaming health check:

from elevenlabs import generate, stream

def test_streaming():
    try:
        audio_stream = generate(
            text="Testing streaming API reliability with a longer sentence.",
            voice="Rachel",
            model="eleven_monolingual_v1",
            stream=True
        )
        
        chunks_received = 0
        for chunk in audio_stream:
            chunks_received += 1
        
        if chunks_received == 0:
            print("Streaming failed - no chunks received")
        elif chunks_received < 5:
            print(f"Streaming degraded - only {chunks_received} chunks")
    except Exception as e:
        print(f"Streaming error: {e}")

The Real Impact When ElevenLabs Goes Down

Content Production Delays

For content creators relying on ElevenLabs:

• Podcast automation halted - Episodes can't be generated on schedule
• YouTube video narration blocked - Upload deadlines missed
• Audiobook production stopped - Publisher deadlines at risk
• Social media content gaps - Daily posting schedules disrupted

A 2-hour outage during peak production hours can delay content releases by days, especially for teams with tight editorial calendars.

Business Operations Impact

Commercial applications face immediate disruption:

E-learning platforms:

• Course audio generation blocked
• Student onboarding delayed
• Accessibility features unavailable

Customer service automation:

• IVR systems degraded
• Voice bots non-functional
• Call center overflow

Accessibility tools:

• Screen readers relying on TTS fail
• Visually impaired users locked out
• ADA compliance issues

Developer applications:

• In-app voice features broken
• User-facing audio generation down
• Game dialogue systems silent

Revenue Loss for Voice Platforms

For businesses built on ElevenLabs:

• SaaS voice platforms - Customers can't use core features, leading to refund requests
• API resellers - Downstream customers affected, SLA breaches
• Content marketplaces - Voice generation services unavailable
• Enterprise contracts - Penalty clauses triggered for downtime

A platform processing $50,000/month in voice generation may face $2,000+ in immediate revenue impact per hour of downtime.

Character Quota Waste

During partial outages, failed requests may still consume character quota:

• Requests timeout but characters deducted
• Poor quality audio forces regeneration
• Error responses consume quota
• Batch processing failures waste budget

Pro tip: Keep detailed logs of request/response pairs during outages to request quota restoration from ElevenLabs support.

Reputation and User Trust

Voice quality issues are immediately noticeable:

• Listeners detect robotic or distorted audio
• Brand perception suffers with poor voice content
• Audience retention drops
• Social media complaints escalate
• Competitors gain advantage during your downtime

For podcast networks and content brands, voice quality directly impacts audience loyalty and sponsorship value.

What to Do When ElevenLabs Goes Down: Incident Response Playbook

1. Implement Robust Error Handling and Retries

Exponential backoff with jitter:

import time
import random
from elevenlabs import generate

def generate_with_retry(text, voice, max_retries=5):
    """Generate TTS with intelligent retry logic"""
    
    for attempt in range(max_retries):
        try:
            audio = generate(
                text=text,
                voice=voice,
                model="eleven_monolingual_v1"
            )
            return audio
            
        except Exception as e:
            if attempt == max_retries - 1:
                raise
            
            # Check if error is retryable
            if "500" in str(e) or "502" in str(e) or "timeout" in str(e).lower():
                wait_time = (2 ** attempt) + random.uniform(0, 1)
                print(f"Attempt {attempt + 1} failed, retrying in {wait_time:.2f}s")
                time.sleep(wait_time)
            else:
                # Non-retryable error (quota, auth, etc.)
                raise

2. Queue Jobs for Later Processing

When ElevenLabs is experiencing issues, queue TTS jobs instead of failing immediately:

import redis
import json
from datetime import datetime

class TTSJobQueue:
    def __init__(self, redis_url):
        self.redis = redis.from_url(redis_url)
    
    def queue_job(self, text, voice, callback_url, priority="normal"):
        """Queue TTS job for processing when service recovers"""
        
        job = {
            "text": text,
            "voice": voice,
            "callback_url": callback_url,
            "priority": priority,
            "queued_at": datetime.utcnow().isoformat(),
            "attempts": 0
        }
        
        queue_name = f"tts_queue:{priority}"
        self.redis.lpush(queue_name, json.dumps(job))
        
        return {
            "status": "queued",
            "message": "Voice generation temporarily delayed. Will process within 4 hours.",
            "estimated_processing": "within 4 hours"
        }
    
    def process_queue(self):
        """Process queued jobs when ElevenLabs recovers"""
        
        for priority in ["high", "normal", "low"]:
            queue_name = f"tts_queue:{priority}"
            
            while True:
                job_data = self.redis.rpop(queue_name)
                if not job_data:
                    break
                
                job = json.loads(job_data)
                
                try:
                    audio = generate(
                        text=job["text"],
                        voice=job["voice"]
                    )
                    
                    # Callback with result
                    requests.post(job["callback_url"], files={"audio": audio})
                    
                except Exception as e:
                    job["attempts"] += 1
                    if job["attempts"] < 3:
                        # Re-queue
                        self.redis.lpush(queue_name, json.dumps(job))
                    else:
                        # Dead letter queue
                        self.redis.lpush("tts_queue:failed", json.dumps(job))

3. Implement Fallback TTS Providers

Enterprise applications should consider multi-provider strategies:

Primary providers to consider:

• ElevenLabs - Best quality, natural voices
• Google Cloud Text-to-Speech - Reliable, WaveNet voices
• Amazon Polly - Good coverage, Neural voices
• OpenAI TTS - High quality, emerging option (see our OpenAI status guide)
• Microsoft Azure Speech - Enterprise-grade, many languages

Fallback implementation:

class VoiceGenerator:
    def __init__(self, elevenlabs_key, google_creds, aws_creds):
        self.elevenlabs_key = elevenlabs_key
        self.google_client = texttospeech.TextToSpeechClient(credentials=google_creds)
        self.polly_client = boto3.client('polly', **aws_creds)
    
    def generate(self, text, quality="high"):
        """Generate TTS with automatic fallback"""
        
        # Try ElevenLabs first (best quality)
        try:
            return self._generate_elevenlabs(text)
        except Exception as e:
            if self._is_elevenlabs_down(e):
                print("ElevenLabs unavailable, falling back to Google")
                
                if quality == "high":
                    return self._generate_google_wavenet(text)
                else:
                    return self._generate_polly(text)
            raise
    
    def _is_elevenlabs_down(self, error):
        """Check if error indicates service outage vs auth/quota issues"""
        error_str = str(error).lower()
        return any(x in error_str for x in ["500", "502", "503", "timeout", "connection"])
    
    def _generate_elevenlabs(self, text):
        from elevenlabs import generate
        return generate(text=text, voice="Rachel")
    
    def _generate_google_wavenet(self, text):
        synthesis_input = texttospeech.SynthesisInput(text=text)
        voice = texttospeech.VoiceSelectionParams(
            language_code="en-US",
            name="en-US-Neural2-F"
        )
        audio_config = texttospeech.AudioConfig(
            audio_encoding=texttospeech.AudioEncoding.MP3
        )
        response = self.google_client.synthesize_speech(
            input=synthesis_input, voice=voice, audio_config=audio_config
        )
        return response.audio_content

4. Cache Generated Audio

Reduce dependency on real-time generation:

import hashlib
import os

class AudioCache:
    def __init__(self, cache_dir="/tmp/audio_cache"):
        self.cache_dir = cache_dir
        os.makedirs(cache_dir, exist_ok=True)
    
    def get_cache_key(self, text, voice, model):
        """Generate cache key from parameters"""
        content = f"{text}|{voice}|{model}"
        return hashlib.sha256(content.encode()).hexdigest()
    
    def get(self, text, voice, model):
        """Retrieve cached audio if available"""
        key = self.get_cache_key(text, voice, model)
        cache_file = os.path.join(self.cache_dir, f"{key}.mp3")
        
        if os.path.exists(cache_file):
            with open(cache_file, "rb") as f:
                return f.read()
        return None
    
    def set(self, text, voice, model, audio_data):
        """Cache generated audio"""
        key = self.get_cache_key(text, voice, model)
        cache_file = os.path.join(self.cache_dir, f"{key}.mp3")
        
        with open(cache_file, "wb") as f:
            f.write(audio_data)
    
    def generate_or_get_cached(self, text, voice, model="eleven_monolingual_v1"):
        """Try cache first, generate if miss"""
        
        # Check cache
        cached = self.get(text, voice, model)
        if cached:
            print("Cache hit - using cached audio")
            return cached
        
        # Generate new
        print("Cache miss - generating audio")
        audio = generate(text=text, voice=voice, model=model)
        
        # Store in cache
        self.set(text, voice, model, audio)
        
        return audio

5. Monitor and Alert Proactively

Comprehensive monitoring setup:

import requests
import time
from datetime import datetime

class ElevenLabsMonitor:
    def __init__(self, api_key, alert_webhook):
        self.api_key = api_key
        self.alert_webhook = alert_webhook
        self.consecutive_failures = 0
        self.alert_threshold = 3
    
    def health_check(self):
        """Perform health check against ElevenLabs API"""
        
        url = "https://api.elevenlabs.io/v1/voices"
        headers = {"xi-api-key": self.api_key}
        
        try:
            start = time.time()
            response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, timeout=10)
            elapsed = time.time() - start
            
            if response.status_code == 200:
                self.consecutive_failures = 0
                return {
                    "status": "healthy",
                    "response_time": elapsed,
                    "timestamp": datetime.utcnow().isoformat()
                }
            else:
                return self._handle_error(f"HTTP {response.status_code}", elapsed)
                
        except requests.exceptions.Timeout:
            return self._handle_error("Timeout", 10.0)
        except Exception as e:
            return self._handle_error(str(e), None)
    
    def _handle_error(self, error, response_time):
        """Handle check failure and trigger alerts"""
        
        self.consecutive_failures += 1
        
        result = {
            "status": "unhealthy",
            "error": error,
            "response_time": response_time,
            "consecutive_failures": self.consecutive_failures,
            "timestamp": datetime.utcnow().isoformat()
        }
        
        if self.consecutive_failures >= self.alert_threshold:
            self._send_alert(result)
        
        return result
    
    def _send_alert(self, health_data):
        """Send alert to team"""
        
        message = f"""
        🚨 ElevenLabs API Health Alert
        
        Status: {health_data['status']}
        Error: {health_data['error']}
        Consecutive Failures: {health_data['consecutive_failures']}
        Time: {health_data['timestamp']}
        
        Check status: https://apistatuscheck.com/api/elevenlabs
        """
        
        requests.post(self.alert_webhook, json={"text": message})

# Run continuously
monitor = ElevenLabsMonitor(api_key="your_key", alert_webhook="your_slack_webhook")

while True:
    result = monitor.health_check()
    print(f"[{result['timestamp']}] Status: {result['status']}")
    time.sleep(60)  # Check every minute

6. Communicate with Users

Status page update:

def update_status_page(status, message):
    """Update your application's status page"""
    
    requests.post(
        "https://api.statuspage.io/v1/pages/YOUR_PAGE_ID/incidents",
        headers={"Authorization": "OAuth YOUR_TOKEN"},
        json={
            "incident": {
                "name": "Voice Generation Delays",
                "status": "investigating",
                "impact_override": "minor",
                "body": f"We're experiencing delays with voice generation due to upstream provider issues. {message}",
                "components": {
                    "YOUR_COMPONENT_ID": "degraded_performance"
                }
            }
        }
    )

User notification:

def notify_affected_users(user_ids):
    """Email users with pending voice generation jobs"""
    
    for user_id in user_ids:
        send_email(
            to=get_user_email(user_id),
            subject="Voice Generation Delayed",
            body="""
            We're currently experiencing delays with voice generation 
            due to temporary service issues with our TTS provider.
            
            Your queued jobs will be processed automatically once 
            service is restored, typically within 2-4 hours.
            
            You can check real-time status at: 
            https://apistatuscheck.com/api/elevenlabs
            
            Thank you for your patience.
            """
        )

7. Post-Outage Recovery

Once ElevenLabs service is restored:

1. Process queued jobs from your job queue (prioritize high-priority first)
2. Verify audio quality - Spot-check generated audio for quality issues
3. Check character quota - Verify deductions match successful generations
4. Request quota restoration - Contact support for quota consumed by failed requests
5. Review monitoring data - Analyze what triggered first, recovery patterns
6. Update documentation - Document lessons learned for next incident
7. Evaluate need for fallbacks - Calculate cost/benefit of multi-provider setup

Frequently Asked Questions

How often does ElevenLabs go down?

ElevenLabs maintains strong uptime, typically exceeding 99.9% availability. Major platform-wide outages are infrequent (2-4 times per year), though users may occasionally experience regional latency issues or degraded performance during high-traffic periods. Most production users experience minimal disruption over a typical month.

What's the difference between ElevenLabs status page and API Status Check?

The official ElevenLabs status page is manually updated by their team during incidents, which can sometimes lag behind actual issues by 5-15 minutes. API Status Check performs automated health checks every 60 seconds against live TTS endpoints, often detecting degraded performance or failures before they're officially reported. Use both for comprehensive monitoring—automated checks for immediate detection, official page for incident details and ETAs.

Do failed requests count against my character quota?

Generally, requests that return 500-series errors or timeout should not consume quota, but this can vary during outages. ElevenLabs typically reviews failed requests and restores quota on a case-by-case basis. Keep detailed logs (request ID, timestamp, error response) and contact support@elevenlabs.io with documentation if you believe quota was incorrectly deducted during an outage.

Should I cache generated audio or generate on-demand?

For production applications, implement hybrid caching:

• Cache static content - UI sounds, standard announcements, repeated phrases
• Cache user-generated content - Previously generated audio for same text/voice combination
• Generate on-demand - Unique or time-sensitive content, personalized messages

Set appropriate TTLs (24-72 hours for dynamic content, longer for static). This dramatically reduces your dependence on real-time API availability and cuts costs.

What's the best fallback TTS provider for ElevenLabs?

The best fallback depends on your priorities:

• Quality priority: OpenAI TTS (newest, high quality) or Google WaveNet (mature, reliable)
• Cost priority: Amazon Polly Standard voices (cheapest) or Microsoft Azure
• Language coverage: Google (220+ voices, 40+ languages) or Azure (400+ voices)
• Low latency: Amazon Polly or ElevenLabs Turbo (when available)

For mission-critical applications processing $10K+/month in voice generation, implement at least one fallback provider. See our guides on OpenAI status and Google Cloud status for monitoring other providers.

How can I minimize latency when using ElevenLabs?

Best practices for low-latency TTS:

1. Use streaming API - WebSocket streaming reduces time-to-first-byte
2. Choose optimized models - eleven_turbo_v2 is faster than eleven_monolingual_v1
3. Reduce text length - Break long content into smaller chunks, process in parallel
4. Pre-generate common phrases - Cache frequently used audio
5. Deploy close to ElevenLabs servers - Use US/EU regions for lowest latency
6. Use lower latency settings - Reduce stability/similarity_boost values slightly

Expect 2-5 seconds for standard generation, <1 second for first chunk with streaming.

Can I monitor multiple TTS providers simultaneously?

Yes! API Status Check supports monitoring your entire voice stack:

• ElevenLabs - Primary TTS
• OpenAI TTS - Fallback option
• Google Cloud TTS - Enterprise fallback
• AWS Polly - Cost-effective backup

Set up unified alerting across all providers to automatically failover when your primary provider experiences issues.

What should I do if voice cloning is down but regular TTS works?

Voice cloning uses different infrastructure than standard TTS. If voice cloning fails but pre-built voices work:

1. Use professional voice library - Switch to similar ElevenLabs pre-built voices temporarily
2. Queue cloning jobs - Save cloning requests for later processing
3. Use cached voices - If you've previously cloned, use the existing voice ID
4. Notify users - Update expected processing time for voice cloning jobs

Voice cloning typically recovers independently of TTS services within a few hours.

How do I know if it's an ElevenLabs issue vs. my application?

ElevenLabs issue indicators:

• Multiple concurrent users reporting same problem
• Direct API testing (curl) fails with same errors
• API Status Check shows downtime
• Reports on Discord/social media from other users
• Official status page confirms incident

Your application issue indicators:

• Only your users affected, direct API test works
• Errors are authentication-related (401/403)
• Quota exceeded errors (verify in dashboard)
• Inconsistent behavior across your servers
• Network/firewall logs show connection issues

Stay Ahead of ElevenLabs Outages

Don't let voice generation failures catch you off guard. Subscribe to real-time ElevenLabs alerts and get notified instantly when issues are detected—before your users complain.

API Status Check monitors ElevenLabs 24/7 with:

• 60-second health checks for TTS and voice cloning endpoints
• Instant alerts via email, Slack, Discord, or webhook
• Historical uptime tracking and incident timeline
• Multi-provider monitoring for your entire voice pipeline
• Response time trends and performance analytics

Start monitoring ElevenLabs now →

Related AI Service Monitoring

Protect your entire AI infrastructure with real-time monitoring:

• OpenAI Status - GPT-4, Whisper, TTS monitoring
• Anthropic Claude Status - Claude API uptime
• Google AI Status - Gemini, PaLM, TTS monitoring
• Replicate Status - AI model inference tracking

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Last updated: February 4, 2026. ElevenLabs status information is provided in real-time based on active monitoring. For official incident reports, always refer to status.elevenlabs.io.