Is Amplitude Down? How to Tell and What to Do

Is Amplitude Down? How to Tell and What to Do

Amplitude powers product analytics for thousands of SaaS teams — tracking user events, funnels, retention, and cohorts. When it degrades, your data pipeline silently drops events. By the time you notice a gap in your charts, hours of behavioral data may already be lost.

The fastest way to know: Statusfield monitors Amplitude continuously and alerts you within minutes. Without monitoring, you find out about Amplitude outages when the data is already gone.

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Common Signs of an Amplitude Outage

Symptom	What's likely happening
Event counts flat or dropping unexpectedly	Ingestion API is degraded or rejecting events
Charts in dashboards not updating	Data processing or query pipeline is lagging
SDK throwing network errors in browser console	Amplitude ingestion endpoint is unreachable
Funnels showing 0 completions despite user activity	Event processing is backlogged or dropped
Cohort syncs not updating in destination tools	Cohort export pipeline is degraded
Behavioral emails not triggering	Amplitude → downstream integration sync is failing
Dashboard load times extremely slow	Query / serving infrastructure is overloaded

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How to Confirm It's Amplitude, Not You

Before changing SDK configuration or escalating internally, rule out your own setup:

1. Check SDK network requests in browser DevTools

Open DevTools → Network → filter for api.amplitude.com or api2.amplitude.com. A healthy event send returns HTTP 200. Repeated 500 or connection-refused errors with no change to your code indicate a platform issue.

2. Verify your API key is active

A 403 or 401 response means credential issue — not a platform outage. Confirm in your Amplitude project settings that the API key being used is active and not rotated.

3. Check ingestion vs. querying separately

Amplitude has separate pipelines for event ingestion (accepting new events) and data querying (serving dashboards). An ingestion outage drops new data. A query outage makes dashboards unavailable but data is not lost — it will appear once the query layer recovers. These fail independently.

4. Review SDK batch upload behavior

Amplitude SDKs buffer events client-side and send them in batches. During a degradation, the SDK will retry. Check whether events are queuing up in the SDK buffer (visible in the SDK's debug logs) — this means data is not lost yet, but it will be if the buffer overflows or the session ends.

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The Problem With Vendor Status Pages

The instinct during an incident is to check Amplitude's own status page. The problem: status pages are updated manually, typically 15–30 minutes after the incident starts — after your data pipeline has already been silently dropping events.

Analytics outages are uniquely dangerous because they're invisible. There's no user-facing error. The product works. The data just disappears.

Statusfield monitors Amplitude continuously and fires alerts the moment it detects a degradation — while your SDK is still trying to retry, not after you notice missing data in your charts.

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What to Do During an Amplitude Outage

Immediate (first 5 minutes)

1. Confirm ingestion vs. dashboards — are new events failing to ingest, or are existing dashboards just slow/unavailable? These require different responses.
2. Check SDK buffer size — Amplitude SDKs have a configurable event queue. If events are queuing but not sending, the data is not yet lost — as long as the session stays open and the buffer doesn't overflow.
3. Evaluate your data criticality — if you're in a high-stakes period (launch, A/B test, campaign), note the exact time ingestion degraded so you can annotate charts later.
4. Check downstream integrations — Amplitude → Slack, Salesforce, or email tools may stop firing. Alert those teams.

Communication (first 15 minutes)

• Alert your product and data teams that analytics may be unreliable for this window.
• If you have a live experiment running, note that the data gap will need to be documented for statistical validity.
• Do not make product decisions based on Amplitude data until ingestion is confirmed recovered.

Recovery

• After Amplitude recovers, check ingestion timestamps to identify the exact gap window.
• Compare event counts before and after the outage to estimate data loss vs. delayed processing (Amplitude sometimes backfills after recovery).
• Annotate your dashboards with the outage window so future trend analysis accounts for the gap.

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Amplitude Components and What Each Outage Looks Like

Amplitude is not one monolithic service — components can degrade independently:

Component	Impact when degraded
HTTP API (ingestion)	Events fail to ingest; SDK retries exhaust; data is lost
Batch API	Bulk server-side event uploads fail
Data processing pipeline	Events ingested but not appearing in dashboards (delay, not loss)
Dashboard / query layer	Charts and funnels unavailable; data intact but inaccessible
Cohort sync	Cohorts not updating in connected tools (HubSpot, Braze, etc.)
Behavioral email triggers	Event-based email automations stop firing
Data export (S3/BigQuery)	Scheduled exports fail; no new data lands in your data warehouse

A data processing delay is recoverable — events are queued and will appear once the backlog clears. An ingestion API outage is not recoverable for events that were never buffered by the SDK.

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Why DIY Monitoring Misses the Real Failure

Building a "ping the Amplitude API every 5 minutes" health check sounds sufficient. In practice:

• Ingestion accepts but drops — Amplitude's API can return 200 while the processing pipeline is degraded, causing events to be accepted but never committed to storage. A simple ping sees "green."
• SDK retries mask the degradation — client SDKs silently retry failed events; your health check may be too coarse to catch the retry storm before the buffer overflows.
• Query and ingestion fail independently — your dashboard may look fine (cached/stale data) while ingestion has been failing for an hour.
• Regional degradation — Amplitude infrastructure failures sometimes affect specific regions; a single-region test won't surface partial outages.

Effective Amplitude monitoring checks the actual ingestion pipeline, not just API reachability. That's what Statusfield does.

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Monitor Amplitude Before Your Data Disappears

Statusfield monitors Amplitude and 1,700+ other services continuously. When something degrades, you get alerted — not after you notice a gap in your charts.

3 monitors, 10 alerts/month, no credit card required.

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FAQ

Is Amplitude down right now?

Statusfield monitors Amplitude continuously and will tell you before your data disappears. If you're seeing flat event counts or missing funnel steps, check Statusfield for real-time status.

Why aren't my Amplitude events showing up?

Check your browser DevTools for network errors on api.amplitude.com. If the SDK is receiving 500 errors, Amplitude's ingestion API is degraded. If the API is returning 200 but events aren't in dashboards, the processing pipeline is lagging — the data may backfill once the backlog clears.

How long do Amplitude outages last?

Most incidents resolve within 1 to 3 hours. Dashboard availability typically recovers before full ingestion backfills complete.

How do I get alerted when Amplitude goes down?

Statusfield monitors Amplitude continuously and fires alerts the moment it detects a degradation — before your data disappears silently. Every plan starts with a free trial — no credit card required.