Is Hotjar Down? How to Tell and What to Do

Is Hotjar Down? How to Tell and What to Do

Hotjar gives product and UX teams heatmaps, scroll maps, session recordings, and user feedback widgets — all powered by a lightweight snippet that captures user behavior in the background. When Hotjar degrades, the failure is invisible. Your site runs normally. Users have no idea. The heatmap data and session recordings just stop accumulating.

The fastest way to know: Statusfield monitors Hotjar continuously and alerts you within minutes. Without monitoring, you find out about a Hotjar outage when you open the dashboard and notice the recording count hasn't moved in hours.

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Common Signs of a Hotjar Outage

Symptom	What's likely happening
Heatmaps not updating despite traffic	Heatmap aggregation pipeline is degraded
Session recording count not increasing	Session capture or ingestion is failing
Recordings play but show blank or partial sessions	Recording transmission pipeline is degraded
Feedback widgets not submitting responses	Feedback ingestion endpoint is down
Hotjar dashboard loading slowly or timing out	Query / serving infrastructure is overloaded
Funnels showing stalled data	Funnel event processing pipeline is impacted
Surveys not appearing on site	Snippet delivery or triggering logic is failing

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How to Confirm It's Hotjar, Not You

Before adjusting your Hotjar configuration or filing a support ticket, eliminate your own setup as the cause:

1. Verify the Hotjar script loads in DevTools

Open DevTools → Network → filter for hotjar.com or static.hotjar.com. The Hotjar tracking script should load with HTTP 200. A 4xx or 5xx on the script itself means the snippet can't initialize, which stops all data collection immediately.

2. Check recording transmission calls

Hotjar sends session recording data to a separate recording endpoint. Filter DevTools for vc.hotjar.io. Repeated failures or timeouts here mean sessions are not being transmitted even if the tracking script loaded correctly.

3. Test the Hotjar object directly

Open your browser console and type window.hj. If this returns undefined, the Hotjar snippet failed to initialize — check whether the script itself loaded. If window.hj exists but calls like hj('event', 'test') silently fail, the API endpoint is degraded.

4. Check your Hotjar site ID and sampling settings

A 403 on the tracking script indicates an invalid site ID or an account-level issue, not a platform outage. Confirm your Hotjar site ID matches what's in your snippet. Also check whether your sampling rate has been adjusted — a 0% sampling rate causes all sessions to be excluded without any platform-side failure.

5. Look for Content Security Policy (CSP) blocks

If you recently tightened your CSP, it may now block static.hotjar.com or vc.hotjar.io. DevTools will show CSP violations in the Console tab — these look like outages but are your configuration, not Hotjar's.

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The Problem With Vendor Status Pages

Hotjar's status page reflects what Hotjar's team has confirmed and manually posted — not what's actually happening on their infrastructure. During an active incident, their status page commonly lags the actual degradation by 15–30 minutes.

For heatmaps and session recordings, a 30-minute gap is significant. Heatmap data is cumulative — a 30-minute dropout during peak traffic may distort click patterns for the entire day's analysis. Session recordings from that window are permanently unrecoverable.

Statusfield monitors Hotjar continuously and fires alerts the moment it detects a degradation — before your heatmap data develops a silent gap that skews your UX analysis.

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What to Do During a Hotjar Outage

Immediate (first 5 minutes)

1. Determine what's affected — is the outage hitting recording capture, heatmap collection, feedback widgets, or the Hotjar dashboard UI? These are separate pipelines that can fail independently.
2. Note the exact start time — heatmap and session recording data cannot be retroactively collected. You need to know the exact window to account for it in your UX analysis and A/B test reporting.
3. Check connected integrations — Hotjar integrates with Google Analytics, HubSpot, Segment, and other tools. If Hotjar's event pipeline is down, behavioral data flowing to those systems will have a gap.
4. Pause any UX research sessions — if your team is running usability tests or reviewing live recordings with users, defer those sessions if recordings are not being captured.

Communication (first 15 minutes)

• Alert your product, design, and marketing teams that Hotjar data is unreliable for this window.
• If you're running a CRO experiment that uses Hotjar heatmaps as supporting evidence, document the gap so your analysis accounts for it.
• Do not use heatmap or recording data from the affected window to make design decisions until you can confirm what was actually captured.

Recovery

• After Hotjar recovers, verify that new sessions are being captured and that heatmaps are updating. Run a test session and confirm it appears in Hotjar within a few minutes.
• Review your heatmap windows — if you're displaying "last 30 days" of clicks, a multi-hour outage during peak traffic may meaningfully distort the heatmap visualization.
• Confirm feedback widget submissions resumed and that any surveys that were live during the outage show complete (not truncated) response data.

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Hotjar Components and What Each Outage Looks Like

Hotjar's platform is composed of separate pipelines that can fail independently:

Component	Impact when degraded
Tracking script CDN (static.hotjar.com)	Snippet fails to load; all data collection stops
Session recording pipeline (vc.hotjar.io)	Sessions not transmitted; recordings permanently lost
Heatmap aggregation	Clicks/scrolls captured but heatmaps not updating
Feedback / survey pipeline	Widget submissions not recorded
Funnels / event processing	Funnel step data not updating
Hotjar dashboard / UI	Existing data inaccessible; collection may still be active
Integrations (GA, HubSpot, Segment)	Behavioral signals not reaching downstream tools

A CDN failure is the most severe: it prevents the snippet from loading entirely, stopping all data collection the moment a page loads. A dashboard-only outage is the least severe: data is still being captured, just temporarily unviewable.

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Why DIY Monitoring Misses Hotjar Failures

Checking whether static.hotjar.com returns a 200 response sounds like sufficient monitoring. It isn't:

• CDN and recording endpoint fail separately — the script can load while vc.hotjar.io (the recording transmission endpoint) is timing out. You'd see a healthy check while sessions are being silently dropped.
• No error surface in your application — Hotjar operates entirely in the background. When it fails, your application logs nothing, your users see nothing, and your alerting sees nothing — unless you have external monitoring.
• Sampling and CSP rule changes mimic outages — a configuration change that looks like an outage is indistinguishable from a platform failure without an external reference point.
• Heatmap gaps compound silently — a 2-hour recording gap during peak traffic can make click patterns look like they shifted, leading to incorrect UX conclusions.

Real Hotjar monitoring needs to verify the recording pipeline end-to-end, not just CDN availability. That's what Statusfield does.

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Monitor Hotjar Before Your Heatmap Data Goes Silent

Statusfield monitors Hotjar and 1,700+ other services continuously. When something degrades, you get alerted — not when you open your heatmap and realize peak-traffic data is missing.

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

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FAQ

Is Hotjar down right now?

Statusfield monitors Hotjar continuously and will alert you before your heatmap data goes silent. If session recording counts have stopped increasing or heatmaps aren't updating despite traffic, check Statusfield for real-time status.

Why is my Hotjar heatmap not updating?

Check DevTools for failures on static.hotjar.com (snippet CDN) and vc.hotjar.io (recording endpoint). Also verify your sampling rate and CSP headers haven't changed — both can cause sessions to disappear without a platform-side issue.

Can Hotjar backfill lost recordings?

No. Session recordings and click data that weren't captured in real time are permanently gone. That's why early detection from an external monitor matters — every minute of undetected outage means unrecoverable UX data.

How do I get alerted when Hotjar goes down?

Statusfield monitors Hotjar continuously and fires alerts the moment it detects a degradation — before your heatmap data develops a gap that skews your analysis. Every plan starts with a free trial — no credit card required.