Cohere builds enterprise-focused AI: large language models for generation and chat, embedding and reranking models for search and retrieval, and the APIs that connect them to business applications. Teams use Cohere to power semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, classification, summarization, and AI assistants inside their own products. Because Cohere usually sits behind a production app rather than a chat window, an outage rarely looks like a friendly error message. It looks like failed API calls, empty search results, or a feature that quietly stops responding. When that happens, the fastest way to tell whether the problem is Cohere or your own setup is the live verdict and user reports at the top of this page, then the checks below.
Common reasons Cohere stops working
- API outages or degraded service: The generation, embedding, or rerank endpoints can slow down or return errors during an incident, even when the website loads fine.
- Authentication and key problems: An expired, revoked, or wrong API key, or a key used in the wrong environment, returns 401 errors that look like an outage.
- Rate limits and quota: Hitting request or token limits, or exhausting a trial or billing tier, produces 429 responses and throttling that mimic downtime.
- Timeouts on large requests: Long prompts, big batches of embeddings, or oversized documents can exceed timeouts and fail intermittently.
- Regional or network issues: DNS, firewall, VPN, or corporate proxy rules can block the API host from your network while Cohere itself is healthy.
- Model or endpoint changes: A deprecated model name or a changed endpoint in your code can break calls that worked yesterday.
- Dashboard and console issues: The web dashboard for keys and usage can have its own problems separate from the API.
How to fix Cohere when it is not working
- Check the verdict first. Read the live status and user reports at the top of this page to see if others are reporting trouble right now.
- Confirm it is not just you. Try the API from a different network and, if possible, a second machine to rule out local DNS, VPN, or firewall blocks.
- Inspect the error code. A 401 points to authentication, 429 to rate limits or quota, and 500-class errors to a server-side problem on Cohere’s end.
- Verify your API key. Regenerate the key in the dashboard if needed and make sure your app is loading the current one from the right environment.
- Check usage and billing. Confirm you have not exhausted your quota or hit a spending cap, and that your account is in good standing.
- Reduce request size. Shorten prompts, batch embeddings in smaller chunks, and add sensible timeouts so partial failures do not cascade.
- Retry with backoff. For transient or rate-limit errors, wait and retry with exponential backoff rather than hammering the endpoint.
- Validate model and endpoint names. Make sure the model and URL in your code still match what the API expects.
- Wait it out. If the signals point to a real outage, the fix is on Cohere’s side. Pause non-urgent jobs and monitor this page for recovery.
Is Cohere down, or is it just you?
Most of what feels like an outage is local. If the API fails from your app but works from a different network, the cause is usually your key, your quota, or a network rule between you and Cohere, not Cohere itself. A quick test is to call a simple endpoint from a clean network and watch the status code. If you get a clean response, the platform is up and the issue is on your side. If every route and network returns server errors and other users are reporting the same, it is far more likely a genuine Cohere incident. For a calm, step-by-step plan, see our guide on what to do when an AI tool is down.
How we check Cohere
We combine two independent signals so you are not relying on a single source. First, we read Cohere’s official status page to capture incidents the company has acknowledged. Second, we run our own independent reachability check from the outside, hitting Cohere directly to confirm whether it actually responds for us. When both signals agree, the verdict is high confidence. When they disagree, for example the status page looks green but our external check fails, we flag the nuance so you can dig deeper. You can read the full process on our methodology page.
Alternatives to Cohere during an outage
If Cohere is down and you need to keep working, a few peer platforms can stand in for chat, generation, and assistant tasks. Consider Claude, ChatGPT, or Mistral as backups. Note that swapping providers usually means different APIs, model names, and output behavior, so a true drop-in replacement is rare for production search and RAG pipelines. Before you switch, confirm the backup is healthy on its own status page so you do not trade one outage for another. Keep credentials for at least one alternative ready in advance so a failover is a config change, not a scramble.
What breaks on the Cohere platform
Cohere is aimed at developers and enterprises rather than casual chat users, so most access happens through its API using a key created in the dashboard. Its product line spans text generation, embeddings, and reranking, which means an incident can affect one capability while the others stay healthy. A reranking or embeddings call failing while generation works, or vice versa, is a meaningful clue that the problem is scoped to a single endpoint rather than the whole API.
When something is wrong, your application receives standard HTTP errors: 401 for a bad or revoked key, 429 when you exceed your rate limit, and 5xx during backend issues. Cohere distinguishes trial keys from production keys, and trial keys carry much tighter limits, so unexpected 429s often trace back to using a trial key in a workload that needs a production one. The dashboard where you sign in and manage keys is a separate surface from inference, so losing access to one does not always mean losing the other.