Is AssemblyAI down? › Outage history › Jan 29, 2026

AssemblyAI outage on Jan 29, 2026: what happened

On Jan 29, 2026, the AssemblyAI status page reported "Async + LLM gateway APIs returning 5xx". About 1 hour 38 min: from Jan 29, 2026, 17:54 UTC to Jan 29, 2026, 19:32 UTC, by the official start and resolution times.

AssemblyAI right now

At our last refresh (Oct 22, 2026, 12:35 UTC) AssemblyAI was up: All Systems Operational.

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Started
Jan 29, 2026, 17:54 UTC
Resolved
Jan 29, 2026, 19:32 UTC
Duration
1 hour 38 min
Official impact
Critical
Affected
Asynchronous API, Website, Streaming API, Playground, Dashboard, LLM Gateway, APIs - Asynchronous API, APIs - LLM Gateway, Web - Playground, APIs - Streaming API, Web - Website, Web - Dashboard
Source
Async + LLM gateway APIs returning 5xx on the AssemblyAI status page

The AssemblyAI status page rated it "Critical", its highest impact level: an outage of the affected parts, not only slowness.

What caused the AssemblyAI outage?

The AssemblyAI status page has not published a cause. Its updates describe the symptoms only.

When was it fixed?

The AssemblyAI status page marked it resolved at Jan 29, 2026, 19:32 UTC, 1 hour 38 min after it started. A fix was in place and being monitored from Jan 29, 2026, 18:30 UTC. Its resolution note: "We have cleared the backlog, and turnaround times are back to normal. Our team continues to actively monitor the situation. We will provide a post-mortem when available."

Timeline of official updates

Every update the AssemblyAI status page posted, oldest first. Times are UTC.

  1. Jan 29, 2026, 17:54 UTC investigating

    We are currently investigating an issue affecting async + LLM gateway services. More updates to come as we learn more.

  2. Jan 29, 2026, 18:02 UTC investigating

    We are continuing to investigate this issue.

  3. Jan 29, 2026, 18:09 UTC investigating

    We are currently investigating an issue affecting our Async and LLM Gateway services, which are returning 500 errors. Our team is actively working to identify and resolve the problem. We will provide updates as more information becomes available. All streaming API and EU endpoint services are running normally. This incident is isolated to NA API endpoints for async + LLM gateway.

  4. Jan 29, 2026, 18:29 UTC investigating

    We are seeing requests beginning to successfully complete and have moved to the monitoring phase. Some requests are still returning 500 errors. Our team continues to actively investigate and monitor the situation. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.

  5. Jan 29, 2026, 18:30 UTC monitoring

    We are seeing requests beginning to successfully complete and have moved to the monitoring phase. Some requests are still returning 500 errors. Our website is down, and logins may be affected. Our team continues to actively investigate and monitor the situation. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.

  6. Jan 29, 2026, 18:42 UTC monitoring

    We are continuing to see requests being completed. We are working through a backlog of requests, resulting in elevated turnaround times while we recover. Our team continues to actively monitor the situation. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.

  7. Jan 29, 2026, 19:18 UTC monitoring

    We are continuing to work through the backlog, and turnaround times are improving. Our team continues to actively monitor the situation. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.

  8. Jan 29, 2026, 19:32 UTC resolved

    We have cleared the backlog, and turnaround times are back to normal. Our team continues to actively monitor the situation. We will provide a post-mortem when available.

The official incident report

Published Feb 5, 2026, 18:35 UTC.

Summary: January 29 Outage On January 29, our Async Transcription and LLM Gateway went down for 25 minutes, followed by two hours of degraded performance. Here's what happened. Our traffic has been steadily increasing and we received an influx of batch transcription jobs that were higher than usual. Autoscaling did what it should-spun up workers. We ran out of spot instances, fell back to on-demand, then hit AWS's Elastic Network Interface limit. Every ECS task needs an ENI. With no ENIs available, our authentication service couldn't rotate its tasks. It scaled to zero. Everything stopped. When we tried to recover, a Lambda function meant to help with failures was hammering the AWS API with describe calls, rate-limiting the very operations we needed to bring things back. A tool built for recovery was blocking recovery. What actually went wrong: We didn't monitor ENI utilization and our authentication service shared resources with batch workers. Traffic spike in one starved the other. What we're doing: Short-term: ENI alerts, isolate auth on dedicated capacity, fix the Lambda. Medium-term: Full multi-region for everything. This was preventable. We had the warning signs and didn't connect them. We're sorry, and we're fixing it.

Read the full report on the AssemblyAI status page

AssemblyAI outage questions

What caused the AssemblyAI outage on Jan 29, 2026?

The AssemblyAI status page has not published a cause.

When was the AssemblyAI outage on Jan 29, 2026 fixed?

The AssemblyAI status page marked it resolved at Jan 29, 2026, 19:32 UTC, 1 hour 38 min after it started. A fix was in place and being monitored from Jan 29, 2026, 18:30 UTC. Its resolution note: "We have cleared the backlog, and turnaround times are back to normal. Our team continues to actively monitor the situation. We will provide a post-mortem when available."

How long did the AssemblyAI outage last?

About 1 hour 38 min: from Jan 29, 2026, 17:54 UTC to Jan 29, 2026, 19:32 UTC, by the official start and resolution times.

Was AssemblyAI completely down?

The AssemblyAI status page rated it "Critical", its highest impact level: an outage of the affected parts, not only slowness. The affected parts listed were: Asynchronous API, Website, Streaming API, Playground, Dashboard, LLM Gateway, APIs - Asynchronous API, APIs - LLM Gateway, Web - Playground, APIs - Streaming API, Web - Website, Web - Dashboard.

Which parts of AssemblyAI were affected?

The AssemblyAI status page listed: Asynchronous API, Website, Streaming API, Playground, Dashboard, LLM Gateway, APIs - Asynchronous API, APIs - LLM Gateway, Web - Playground, APIs - Streaming API, Web - Website, Web - Dashboard.

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Quotes are the AssemblyAI status page's own words, from the official incident. Is It Up or Down is independent and not affiliated with AssemblyAI. Times are UTC.