Is Fly.io Down? How to Check Fly.io Status in Real-Time

Is Fly.io Down? How to Check Fly.io Status in Real-Time

Quick Answer: To check if Fly.io is down, visit apistatuscheck.com/api/fly for real-time monitoring, or check the official status.flyio.net page. Common signs include deployment failures, machine boot errors, volume mount issues, networking problems, region-specific outages, and CLI authentication errors.

When your production applications suddenly stop responding or deployments fail, every second of downtime impacts your users and revenue. Fly.io powers thousands of applications across its global edge network, making any platform issue critical for developers relying on edge computing. Whether you're experiencing failed deployments, machine crashes, or mysterious networking errors, quickly verifying Fly.io's status can save hours of troubleshooting and help you make informed decisions about your infrastructure.

How to Check Fly.io Status in Real-Time

1. API Status Check (Fastest Method)

The quickest way to verify Fly.io's operational status is through apistatuscheck.com/api/fly. This real-time monitoring service:

  • Tests actual API endpoints every 60 seconds
  • Shows response times and latency trends
  • Tracks historical uptime over 30/60/90 days
  • Provides instant alerts when issues are detected
  • Monitors multiple regions (US, EU, APAC, and edge locations)

Unlike status pages that rely on manual updates, API Status Check performs active health checks against Fly.io's production endpoints, giving you the most accurate real-time picture of platform availability.

2. Official Fly.io Status Page

Fly.io maintains status.flyio.net 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 (API, Machines, Volumes, Networking, Anycast, WireGuard)
  • Per-region status information

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

3. Check Fly.io Community and Social

The Fly.io community is highly active and often reports issues before official status updates:

When multiple users report similar issues simultaneously, it's a strong signal of a platform-wide problem.

4. Test with Fly CLI

For developers, testing with the Fly CLI can quickly confirm platform connectivity:

# Check authentication and API connectivity
fly auth whoami

# Check machine status in your app
fly status -a your-app-name

# Test deployment with a simple health check
fly checks list -a your-app-name

# Check specific region connectivity
fly platform regions

Look for authentication failures, timeout errors, or unable to connect messages that might indicate platform issues rather than application problems.

5. Monitor Dashboard and Metrics

If the Fly.io Dashboard at fly.io/dashboard is showing issues:

  • Slow loading or timeouts accessing app details
  • Metrics not updating in real-time
  • Machine state showing as "unknown"
  • Inability to restart or scale applications

Dashboard problems often accompany broader API issues but can also occur independently due to control plane degradation.

Common Fly.io Issues and How to Identify Them

Deployment Failures

Symptoms:

  • fly deploy hanging at "Deploying..."
  • Builds completing but machines failing to start
  • Timeout errors during image push
  • "Error failed to fetch an image or build from source" messages
  • Deployments stuck in "pending" state

What it means: When deployment infrastructure is degraded, successful builds may fail to launch, or the entire deployment pipeline may become unresponsive. This differs from application-specific deployment failures—you'll see a pattern across multiple apps or regions.

How to distinguish from app issues: Try deploying a known-good configuration or creating a test app. If those also fail, it's likely a platform issue.

Machine Boot Failures

Common error patterns during outages:

  • Machines repeatedly crashing with no application logs
  • "Could not start machine" errors after deployment
  • Machines stuck in "starting" state indefinitely
  • Host allocation failures: "no host available in region"
  • Machine scheduling errors: "failed to schedule machine"

Root causes during outages:

  • Compute capacity exhaustion in specific regions
  • Hypervisor infrastructure problems
  • Image registry connectivity issues
  • Network namespace allocation failures

Diagnostic command:

fly logs -a your-app-name
fly status -a your-app-name --all

If you see no application logs but machines fail immediately, it's often infrastructure-related.

Volume Mount Issues

Volumes are persistent storage attached to Fly machines, and mounting issues manifest as:

Symptoms:

  • "Failed to mount volume" errors at boot
  • Data loss or volumes appearing empty
  • Applications unable to write to mounted directories
  • Volume detachment during machine restart
  • "volume not found" errors for existing volumes

What it means: Fly's distributed volume system relies on network-attached storage. During outages, volume orchestration services may fail, causing mount failures even though your volume data is safe.

Critical impact: Database containers (PostgreSQL, MySQL) that depend on volumes will fail to start, causing complete application outages.

Networking and DNS Problems

Anycast IP routing issues:

  • Applications unreachable despite showing as "started"
  • Intermittent connectivity from specific geographic locations
  • TLS/SSL handshake failures at the edge
  • "No route to host" errors from users

WireGuard VPN problems:

# Test WireGuard connectivity
fly wireguard create
fly wireguard status

If WireGuard is down, you can't access private networks or connect to internal services.

DNS resolution failures:

  • .fly.dev domains not resolving
  • Internal .internal addresses failing
  • Flycast (.flycast) internal routing broken

Private networking issues:

  • 6PN (IPv6 private network) connectivity lost
  • Service discovery failing between machines
  • Inter-region communication broken

Region-Specific Outages

Fly.io's multi-region architecture means outages can be localized:

Symptoms:

  • Applications in one region down, others operational
  • Deployments failing only to specific regions
  • Elevated latency from certain geographic areas
  • Region showing "degraded" on status page

Common affected regions during incidents:

  • iad (Ashburn, VA) - US East
  • sjc (San Jose, CA) - US West
  • lhr (London) - Europe
  • nrt (Tokyo) - Asia
  • syd (Sydney) - Australia

Mitigation: If you've deployed to multiple regions with autoscaling, traffic should automatically route to healthy regions. Single-region apps will experience full downtime.

Check region status:

fly platform regions
fly status -a your-app-name --all

CLI Authentication Errors

Authentication failures preventing deployments:

  • "Error authentication failed" despite valid tokens
  • "Token expired" for recently refreshed tokens
  • OAuth flow failures during fly auth login
  • API returning 401/403 errors consistently

What it means: The authentication service or token validation infrastructure may be experiencing issues. This blocks all CLI operations including deployments, scaling, and log access.

Workaround: If you have existing applications running, they'll continue operating—only control plane operations are affected.

The Real Impact When Fly.io Goes Down

Production Applications Offline

Every minute of downtime translates to immediate user impact:

  • Web applications: Users receive 502/504 gateway errors
  • API services: Client applications fail with connection errors
  • Background workers: Job processing halts, queues back up
  • Databases: If volume mounting fails, data access completely blocked

For a SaaS platform serving 10,000 requests per minute, even a brief outage creates thousands of failed user experiences.

Deployment Pipelines Blocked

Modern CI/CD workflows depend on successful deployments:

  • Pull request previews fail to generate
  • Production releases stuck in pending state
  • Hotfixes cannot be deployed during critical incidents
  • Rollbacks become impossible if control plane is down

Cascading effect: A broken deployment pipeline during a separate application bug means you can't ship the fix, compounding the incident duration.

Latency Spikes Degrading User Experience

Even when applications remain online, performance degradation impacts users:

  • API response times spike from milliseconds to seconds
  • Database queries time out
  • Asset loading becomes slow or fails
  • Users abandon workflows due to poor performance

Global impact: Fly's edge computing model means latency issues in one region can affect users worldwide if traffic routing is impacted.

Edge Deployments Failing

Fly.io's core value proposition is running apps close to users. When edge infrastructure fails:

  • Geographic load balancing stops working
  • Traffic routes sub-optimally (US users hitting EU regions)
  • Edge caching breaks, increasing origin load
  • Multi-region redundancy collapses to single region

This defeats the primary reason many teams choose Fly.io—low latency through edge distribution.

Data Concerns with Volume Issues

While Fly.io's volume system is designed for durability, mounting failures create business risk:

  • Perceived data loss: Volumes appear empty even though data is safe
  • Backup delays: Can't access volumes to perform backups
  • Database corruption risk: Hard shutdowns during volume issues may corrupt databases
  • Recovery complexity: Requires platform resolution before accessing data

Critical for stateful apps: PostgreSQL, Redis, file storage systems become completely unavailable.

Scaling Operations Blocked

During traffic spikes or incidents, the inability to scale compounds problems:

  • Auto-scaling stops responding to load increases
  • Manual scaling commands fail or time out
  • Machine creation queues back up
  • Resource limits cannot be adjusted

Scenario: Your app goes viral on social media, traffic spikes 10x, but you can't scale up machines to handle the load. This turns a success scenario into a downtime incident.

Customer Trust and SLA Violations

For businesses running production workloads on Fly.io:

  • Customer SLA commitments breached
  • Support ticket volume spikes
  • Social media complaints damage reputation
  • Enterprise customers reconsider platform choice
  • Incident post-mortems required for stakeholders

While Fly.io's overall reliability is strong, outages are particularly painful for edge computing workloads where users expect consistently low latency globally.

What to Do When Fly.io Goes Down: Incident Response Playbook

1. Verify It's Actually Fly.io (Not Your App)

Before assuming platform issues, quickly rule out application problems:

Check application logs:

fly logs -a your-app-name --limit 100

Look for application-level errors (code bugs, dependency failures) vs. infrastructure errors (cannot bind port, volume mount failures).

Test with a minimal app:

# Create a test app in the same region
fly launch --name test-app --region iad --image nginx:alpine

If the test app also fails, it's platform-wide.

Check monitoring and APM tools:

  • Verify your monitoring (Datadog, New Relic) shows issues
  • Compare error rates: sudden spike = likely platform issue
  • Check if errors are region-specific or global

2. Check Status Pages and Community

Immediate checks:

  1. apistatuscheck.com/api/fly - real-time monitoring
  2. status.flyio.net - official status page
  3. community.fly.io - community reports
  4. @flydotio on Twitter/X - official announcements

If there's no official incident posted yet:

  • Search community forum for recent reports
  • Check if others are experiencing similar issues
  • Consider posting a brief report (helps Fly.io identify issues faster)

3. Assess Your Blast Radius

Determine scope of impact:

# List all your apps and their status
fly apps list

# Check status of each critical app
fly status -a app-1 --all
fly status -a app-2 --all

Document:

  • Which apps are affected vs. operational
  • Which regions are impacted
  • What percentage of traffic is impacted
  • Whether auto-scaling is compensating in healthy regions

Prioritize response:

  • Critical user-facing apps first
  • Internal tools second
  • Development/staging environments last

4. Implement Immediate Mitigations

If multi-region deployment exists:

# Scale up machines in healthy regions
fly scale count 6 --region sfo -a your-app-name
fly scale count 6 --region ams -a your-app-name

# Remove affected region from routing (if using Fly Proxy)
# This happens automatically but can be forced via region removal

If single-region deployment:

# Try failover to another region (if volumes allow)
fly regions add sfo -a your-app-name
fly deploy --region sfo -a your-app-name

⚠️ Note: This only works if your app doesn't require persistent volumes in the original region.

Activate backup infrastructure:

  • If you have a standby deployment on another platform (Render, Railway, Vercel), update DNS to point there
  • Requires advance preparation with ready-to-activate deployments

Enable maintenance mode:

# Option 1: Deploy a static maintenance page
fly deploy --strategy=immediate --maintenance-mode

# Option 2: Update your app to show maintenance page
# Then deploy if deployment is working

5. Communicate Proactively

Internal communication:

  • Alert your engineering team immediately
  • Brief customer support with templated responses
  • Notify business stakeholders of impact and ETA
  • Document incident timeline for post-mortem

External communication:

Status page update (if you have one):

🟡 Investigating: We're experiencing deployment issues on Fly.io infrastructure.
   Existing applications may be impacted. We're monitoring the situation.
   
   Timeline:
   - 14:32 UTC: Issue detected
   - 14:35 UTC: Confirmed Fly.io platform issue
   - 14:40 UTC: Monitoring official status updates

Customer notifications:

  • Email critical customers about potential service disruption
  • Post to social media channels if user-facing impact
  • Update in-app banners or notification systems
  • Provide alternative contact methods if support systems are down

Template message:

"We're currently experiencing service disruptions due to infrastructure issues with our hosting provider, Fly.io. Our team is actively monitoring the situation. Estimated resolution: [TIME]. Updates: [LINK]"

6. Monitor and Document Everything

Set up active monitoring:

# Continuously monitor app status
watch -n 30 "fly status -a your-app-name --all"

# Stream logs for errors
fly logs -a your-app-name

Document for post-mortem:

  • Screenshot status pages at different times
  • Save Fly CLI output showing errors
  • Record customer reports and support tickets
  • Track financial impact (lost transactions, SLA credits)
  • Note effective and ineffective mitigation attempts

Monitor resolution:

  • Watch for "Resolved" on status.flyio.net
  • Test deployments in affected regions
  • Verify machines boot successfully
  • Confirm networking and DNS resolution
  • Check volume mounts if applicable

7. Post-Outage Recovery Actions

Once Fly.io reports resolution:

Verify platform stability:

# Test deployment in affected region
fly deploy --region iad -a your-app-name

# Verify machine boots successfully
fly status -a your-app-name --all

# Check volume mounts
fly volumes list -a your-app-name
fly ssh console -a your-app-name -C "df -h"

# Confirm networking
fly checks list -a your-app-name

Restore normal operations:

  1. Scale back to normal machine counts if over-provisioned
  2. Re-enable auto-scaling policies
  3. Verify database integrity if using persistent volumes
  4. Process any queued background jobs
  5. Check for data inconsistencies
  6. Review and respond to support tickets

Assess impact:

  • Calculate total downtime duration
  • Measure revenue impact or SLA violations
  • Review error logs for data quality issues
  • Survey customer impact

Post-incident review:

  • Document what worked and what didn't
  • Identify improvements to incident response
  • Consider architecture changes (multi-region, multi-cloud)
  • Update runbooks and playbooks
  • Schedule team post-mortem meeting

Consider reaching out to Fly.io:

  • Enterprise customers: Contact your account manager
  • Open source projects: Mention in community forum
  • General users: Email support@fly.io with incident details
  • Request incident analysis if impacted significantly

8. Improve Resilience for Next Time

Architecture improvements:

# Deploy to multiple regions for redundancy
fly regions add iad sfo ams nrt -a your-app-name
fly scale count 2 --region iad -a your-app-name
fly scale count 2 --region sfo -a your-app-name

# Enable auto-scaling
fly autoscale set min=3 max=10 -a your-app-name

Monitoring enhancements:

  • Subscribe to API Status Check alerts
  • Set up synthetic monitoring (Pingdom, Checkly)
  • Configure PagerDuty or Opsgenie integrations
  • Monitor Fly.io status page via RSS

Deployment safety:

  • Implement blue-green deployments
  • Use smoke tests after deployment
  • Add deployment validation checks
  • Consider canary deployments for critical apps

Backup strategies:

  • Automate volume snapshots
  • Replicate critical data off-platform
  • Maintain hot standbys on alternative platforms
  • Document manual failover procedures

Team preparedness:

  • Create incident response runbooks (like this playbook)
  • Conduct fire drills simulating Fly.io outages
  • Establish on-call rotation with clear escalation
  • Maintain updated contact list for Fly.io support

Frequently Asked Questions

How often does Fly.io go down?

Fly.io maintains strong uptime, typically exceeding 99.9% availability. Major platform-wide outages are rare (2-4 times per year), though regional or component-specific issues may occur more frequently. Most applications experience zero downtime in a typical month due to multi-region deployments. Check apistatuscheck.com/api/fly for historical uptime data.

What's the difference between Fly.io status page and API Status Check?

The official Fly.io status page (status.flyio.net) is manually updated by Fly.io's team during incidents, which can lag behind actual issues by several minutes during incident detection. API Status Check performs automated health checks every 60 seconds against live API endpoints and deployment infrastructure, often detecting issues before they're officially reported. Use both for comprehensive monitoring—API Status Check for early detection, status page for official incident communication.

Can multi-region deployment prevent Fly.io downtime?

Multi-region deployment significantly improves resilience. Fly.io's Anycast routing automatically directs traffic to healthy regions when one region experiences issues. However, platform-wide outages affecting the control plane (API, deployments) impact all regions simultaneously. For maximum resilience, consider multi-cloud strategies with failover to alternative platforms like Railway, Render, or AWS.

What happens to my data during volume mounting failures?

Fly.io volumes use distributed storage with replication for durability. During mounting failures, your data remains safe but temporarily inaccessible. Once the platform issue resolves, volumes remount and data is restored. However, always maintain external backups—never rely solely on platform storage for critical data. Use automated snapshot tools or replicate to object storage like S3.

Should I use Fly.io for mission-critical applications?

Fly.io is production-ready and powers many mission-critical applications, but like any platform, it has trade-offs. For mission-critical workloads, implement: (1) multi-region deployment across at least 3 regions, (2) external monitoring and alerting, (3) automated backups off-platform, (4) documented failover procedures, and (5) consider multi-cloud architecture for maximum resilience. Many enterprises successfully run critical workloads on Fly.io with these safeguards.

How do I prevent deployment failures during Fly.io issues?

Implement robust deployment practices: (1) Always test deployments in a staging app first, (2) Use fly deploy --strategy rolling to avoid full outages, (3) Implement health checks so bad deploys auto-rollback, (4) Maintain the previous Docker image as a known-good rollback target, (5) Monitor deployment success rates and alert on failures, (6) Consider deploying during low-traffic windows. If the platform is degraded, delay non-critical deployments until resolution.

What regions should I deploy to for maximum availability?

For optimal resilience, choose regions distributed across different geographic areas and availability zones: iad (US East), sfo or sjc (US West), lhr or ams (Europe), and nrt or syd (Asia-Pacific). This distribution ensures user proximity while protecting against region-specific outages. Use fly platform regions to see all available regions and their current status. Deploy to at least 3 regions for production applications.

Is there a Fly.io downtime notification service?

Yes, several options exist:

Stay Ahead of Fly.io Outages

Don't let deployment failures and infrastructure issues catch you off guard. Subscribe to real-time Fly.io alerts and get notified instantly when issues are detected—before your users notice.

API Status Check monitors Fly.io 24/7 with:

  • 60-second health checks across all regions and services
  • Instant alerts via email, Slack, Discord, or webhook
  • Historical uptime tracking and incident reports
  • Multi-platform monitoring for your entire infrastructure stack

Compare Fly.io with other platforms:

Start monitoring Fly.io now →

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

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