Is Heroku Down? How to Check Heroku Status Right Now

Heroku hosts hundreds of thousands of applications — from side projects to production workloads processing millions of requests. When Heroku has an outage, dynos crash, deploys fail, add-on connections drop, and pipelines stall. Here's how to tell if Heroku is the problem and what to watch.

Is Heroku Down Right Now?

Check these in order:

1. Statusfield — Heroku status — real-time monitoring tracking all Heroku components continuously.
2. Heroku's official status page — status.heroku.com publishes active incidents and component-level health.
3. Twitter/X — search heroku down sorted by Latest. Developers are vocal about deploy failures and dyno issues.
4. Heroku Community — help.heroku.com and the Heroku Slack community often surface incidents before official acknowledgment.

Heroku Components That Can Fail Independently

Heroku is a platform with distinct services — each can fail without affecting the others:

Component	What breaks when it fails
Dyno Runtime	Running applications crash, restart loops begin, 503s returned to users
Router	Requests fail to reach dynos; upstream connect errors, 503s at your domain
Build System (Slug Compiler)	git push heroku main hangs or fails; deploys don't complete
Heroku Postgres	Database connections drop; queries fail; add-on credentials may become invalid
Heroku Redis	Redis connections fail; caching, sessions, queues break
Add-on Marketplace	Provisioning new add-ons fails; existing add-ons may be unaffected
API	heroku CLI commands fail; programmatic deployments break
Pipelines	Review apps don't spin up; pipeline promotions fail
Scheduler	Scheduled jobs don't fire on time or miss execution windows
CI	Heroku CI test runs fail to start or time out

A Postgres add-on outage doesn't affect your dyno runtime — your app is still running, just unable to query the database. A dyno runtime outage affects every request, regardless of whether your database is healthy.

Common Errors During a Heroku Outage

Error	Likely cause
Error R14 (Memory quota exceeded) at scale	Dyno runtime degraded, not necessarily your code
Error H10 (App crashed) on all dynos simultaneously	Dyno runtime or router incident
Error H99 (Platform error)	Heroku router or infrastructure error — not your app
git push heroku main hangs indefinitely	Build system degraded
Heroku CLI: Error: connect ECONNREFUSED	Heroku API is down
FATAL: too many connections on Postgres	Postgres infrastructure under stress, not just connection pool exhaustion
Scheduler jobs silently missing	Heroku Scheduler outage; jobs queued but not executed

Key signal: Error codes in the H9x and R1x ranges are Heroku platform errors — not application errors. If you suddenly see H10, H12, H13, or H99 errors across all requests simultaneously, check Statusfield before investigating your code.

Why Heroku Dyno Restarts Look Like App Bugs

During a Heroku runtime incident, dynos may restart repeatedly with no changes to your code. The symptoms look exactly like an application memory leak or crash loop:

1. Users start reporting 503 errors
2. You check Heroku logs: dyno restarts, Error R14 or Error H10
3. You check your application code — nothing changed
4. You scale up dynos — errors continue
5. You start reverting recent deploys — no effect

This loop can burn 60+ minutes. Checking Statusfield first tells you immediately whether Heroku's infrastructure is the root cause. If the platform shows degraded, there's nothing to fix in your code.

Heroku Postgres During Outages

Heroku Postgres is a managed PostgreSQL service that runs independently from your application dynos. Failures can be isolated to specific plans (Hobby, Standard, Premium) or affect the shared infrastructure:

• Connection failures: Your app logs PG::ConnectionBad or ActiveRecord::StatementInvalid
• Replication lag: Read replicas fall behind; queries to follower databases return stale data
• Failover events: During planned or unplanned failover, 30–90 seconds of write unavailability is expected
• Credential rotation: Rare, but Heroku has rotated credentials during incidents — verify your DATABASE_URL config var after an incident

If Heroku Postgres shows healthy but your app can't connect, check your connection pool configuration. Puma, Unicorn, and Sidekiq all have different pool sizing requirements.

Pipelines and Review Apps

Heroku Pipelines (staging → production promotion) and Review Apps are among the first features affected during a build system incident:

• Review apps won't spin up for new PRs; existing review apps continue running
• Pipeline promotions fail if the slug can't be copied between stages
• CI runs queue but don't start during build system degradation

If you're blocked on a production deploy because a pipeline promotion is failing, check Heroku status before spending time debugging your app.json or pipeline configuration.

How to Get Instant Heroku Outage Alerts

Dyno crashes and deploy failures found by users — not monitoring — are an expensive way to learn about incidents.

Monitor Heroku on Statusfield — Statusfield polls Heroku's status page continuously and sends you an alert the moment any component changes status. Route alerts to email, Slack, or a webhook into your on-call system.

For production applications: combine Heroku monitoring with your own application uptime check. A Heroku incident that crashes your dynos needs the same response urgency as an application-level error — the earlier you know, the faster you can communicate to users and start the incident response process.

Start monitoring Heroku on Statusfield → — free, no credit card required.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is Heroku down for everyone or just me?

Check Statusfield or status.heroku.com. If the platform shows operational but your app is broken, the issue is likely your application code, a misconfigured add-on, or a connection pool problem — not Heroku's infrastructure. Check your Heroku logs with heroku logs --tail to distinguish.

My dyno shows crashed but Heroku status is green — what's happening?

A crashed dyno with a healthy platform means the crash is in your application. Common causes: missing environment variables, a failed database migration on deploy, an unhandled exception at startup, or a gem/dependency conflict. Run heroku logs --tail immediately after the crash to capture the startup error.

Heroku deploy is stuck at "Compressing..." — is this an outage?

Check the build system component on Statusfield. During build system degradation, the slug compiler can hang at any stage — including compression. If the platform shows healthy and your build has been stuck for more than 15 minutes, try heroku builds:cancel and re-push.

How do I check if Heroku Postgres is the problem?

Check the Heroku Postgres component on Heroku's status page. You can also run heroku pg:info — if it times out or returns an error, the Postgres infrastructure is likely degraded. For quick connection testing: heroku run psql $DATABASE_URL -c "SELECT 1;".

Can I deploy to Heroku during a build system outage?

Not via git push heroku. As a workaround, you can release a previously compiled slug: heroku releases:rollback to a known-good version keeps your application available while the build system recovers. If you maintain Docker-based deploys, heroku container:push and heroku container:release use a different pipeline.

How often does Heroku go down?

Heroku publishes full incident history at status.heroku.com. Heroku's uptime has varied historically, with more frequent incidents noted since the Salesforce acquisition. For production workloads, monitoring the platform status alongside your own application health gives you faster incident response.

Published: April 12, 2026. Check current Heroku status →