Is PagerDuty Down? How to Check Status in 2026

PagerDuty is the de facto incident management platform for DevOps and SRE teams at thousands of enterprises. The irony of PagerDuty downtime is acute: your system for managing incidents has its own incident. This guide helps you verify PagerDuty outages quickly and manage incidents when your alerting infrastructure is compromised.

How to Verify a PagerDuty Outage

1. Check the Official PagerDuty Status Page

PagerDuty maintains a detailed status page at status.pagerduty.com. It shows granular component health for: API, Notifications (phone, SMS, email, push), Integrations, and the PagerDuty web app. Critically, check which notification type is affected — a phone outage is very different from a full API outage.

2. Test the PagerDuty API

Verify the API is responding:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
  https://api.pagerduty.com/abilities \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.pagerduty+json;version=2" \
  -H "Authorization: Token token=YOUR_API_TOKEN"
# Expect 200 if the PagerDuty API is healthy

3. Test a Manual Event Integration

Send a test event to PagerDuty's Events API to verify event ingestion is working:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" \
  -X POST https://events.pagerduty.com/v2/enqueue \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"routing_key": "YOUR_INTEGRATION_KEY", "event_action": "trigger", "payload": {"summary": "Status test", "severity": "info", "source": "api-status-check"}}'
# Expect 202 Accepted

Emergency Playbook: PagerDuty Down During an Active Incident

Common PagerDuty Failure Modes

• Phone/SMS Notification Failures: The most common partial outage. PagerDuty relies on telephony providers (Twilio and others) for voice and SMS. Carrier issues can delay or drop alerts.
• Events API Ingestion Lag: High-volume alerting (e.g., a widespread monitoring system storm) can cause the Events API to queue events with delays before processing.
• Web App Availability: The PagerDuty dashboard itself can be degraded while the core alerting infrastructure remains functional.
• AWS Regional Issues: PagerDuty is hosted on AWS. US-EAST-1 disruptions in particular can affect PagerDuty availability.

Building PagerDuty Redundancy

The SRE best practice is to treat your monitoring and incident management infrastructure as itself requiring high availability:

• Use multiple notification channels: Always configure phone AND email AND Slack as escalation paths. If phone fails, email often still works.
• Maintain an offline escalation document: Accessible via Google Drive, Confluence, or printed copy.
• Consider redundant alerting: Some teams use OpsGenie or Rootly as a secondary system for critical services, with PagerDuty as primary.
• Set up direct monitoring on PagerDuty: Use API Status Check to ping the PagerDuty Events API every 5 minutes and alert via alternative channels (email, Slack webhook) if it goes unresponsive.

Frequently Asked Questions