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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.
Statusfield brings reported Hotjar incidents into the same workspace as your other monitors. Select supported components and route relevant changes to your team. Vendor reports can lag an incident, so check your own application as well.
Follow Hotjar incidents with your team
Statusfield brings reported status for Hotjar together with your other critical tools. Choose the changes that should alert your team. Eligible new accounts can start a free trial — no credit card required.
Try any paid plan for 30 days, no credit card required. Free trial for first-time customers.
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 |
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.
Use vendor reports as investigation context
Statusfield brings reported Hotjar incidents into the same workspace as your other monitors. Select supported components and route relevant changes to your team. Vendor reports can lag an incident, so check your own application as well.
A reported incident can help you decide where to investigate and what to tell your team. An operational status does not prove that your account, region or complete workflow is working. Review the affected components and timestamps alongside your own logs and checks.
What to Do During a Hotjar Outage
Immediate (first 5 minutes)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
Match the check to the failure you need to catch
Follow supported Hotjar components for vendor-reported incidents. Add a public HTTPS check for your own website or API and define acceptable response codes, response time and body checks. A successful request is evidence about that endpoint, not proof that an entire customer journey works.
Use application logs and end-to-end tests for authenticated workflows, data correctness and transactions. Statusfield brings the monitoring results and vendor context together; it does not run a complete checkout or login flow.
Bring Hotjar updates to your team
Follow reported Hotjar status in Statusfield and choose which changes reach your configured alert destinations. Delivery depends on source updates, polling and successful processing. Check the catalog for supported components and the pricing page for channel availability.
Eligible first-time customers can start a free trial, no credit card required.
Follow Hotjar incidents with your team
Follow Hotjar and your other vendors in one Statusfield workspace. Select supported components and route the updates your team needs. Eligible new accounts can start a free trial — no credit card required.
Try any paid plan for 30 days, no credit card required. Free trial for first-time customers.
FAQ
Is Hotjar down right now?
This article is a troubleshooting guide, not a live outage verdict. Check the Statusfield catalog and the official vendor status page for the latest reported status, affected components and observation times. Compare those reports with what your own application is experiencing.
How can I get alerts about Hotjar incidents?
Follow reported Hotjar status in Statusfield and choose which changes reach your configured alert destinations. Delivery depends on source updates, polling and successful processing. Check the catalog for supported components and the pricing page for channel availability.
Does an operational Hotjar status mean my application is working?
No. A vendor status page describes reported service conditions. Your account, integration, network or application can still fail. Check your own public HTTPS endpoint and use logs or workflow tests to investigate the customer experience.
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