ElevenLabs is a voice and audio AI platform. People use it to generate realistic text to speech, clone voices, dub videos into other languages, build conversational voice agents, and produce narration for audiobooks, videos, games, and apps. Most of that work runs through the web app and the API, so when something breaks the impact is immediate: a render stalls, an agent goes silent, or a batch of audio fails to deliver. If you landed here, start with the live verdict and recent user reports at the top of this page to see whether others are hitting the same wall right now.
Common reasons ElevenLabs stops working
- API errors and timeouts. Long generations, dubbing jobs, and high-volume calls can return 429 rate limits, 5xx errors, or simply hang before audio is returned.
- Quota and credit limits. Running out of monthly character credits, or hitting concurrency caps on your plan, looks like an outage but is account-level throttling.
- Authentication problems. An expired, revoked, or mistyped API key blocks requests even when the service itself is healthy.
- Web app loading issues. The studio or dashboard fails to load, voices do not appear, or playback stays silent because of a browser, cache, or session problem.
- Voice cloning and upload failures. Large or unsupported audio files, or samples that fail processing, can stall partway through.
- Regional or network blocks. A VPN, firewall, corporate proxy, or local DNS issue can cut you off while the platform runs fine elsewhere.
- Real backend incidents. Sometimes the models, the API, or the conversational agent layer are genuinely degraded and the fix is to wait.
How to fix ElevenLabs when it is not working
- Confirm the scope first. Check the verdict and reports at the top of this page. If reports are spiking, it is likely on ElevenLabs’s side and waiting is the right move.
- Reload and clear local state. Hard refresh the web app, clear the cache, try an incognito window, or switch browsers to rule out a stale session.
- Check your account. Sign in and review remaining credits, your plan’s concurrency limits, and billing status. Upgrading or waiting for the quota reset often restores access.
- Verify your API key. Regenerate the key, confirm it is set correctly in your environment, and check you are calling the right endpoint with valid parameters.
- Shrink the request. Split long text, reduce batch size, lower concurrency, and add retries with backoff so transient 429 and 5xx errors recover cleanly.
- Test your connection. Disable any VPN or proxy, switch networks (for example mobile data), and try a different device to isolate a local issue.
- Re-check your inputs. For cloning and dubbing, confirm file format, size, and length match the supported limits, then re-upload.
- If nothing helps, wait and retry. During a confirmed incident the only real fix is patience. Our broader guide on what to do when an AI tool is down walks through how to keep working in the meantime.
Is ElevenLabs down, or is it just you?
The difference matters because the fix is different. If only you are affected, the cause is usually local: your API key, your credits, your network, or your browser, and the steps above will get you moving again. If many users are reporting trouble at once, it is almost certainly a platform-wide issue and no amount of local troubleshooting will help. The fastest way to tell them apart is to compare your experience against the live verdict and the volume of recent user reports on this page. A sudden surge points to a real outage; a quiet board points back at your own setup.
How we check ElevenLabs
We combine two independent signals so you are not relying on a single source. First, we read ElevenLabs’s official status page to catch incidents the company has acknowledged. Second, we run our own outside-in reachability check, hitting ElevenLabs from our infrastructure to confirm it actually responds, because an official page can lag behind a live problem. When those two signals disagree, we surface it rather than hide it. You can read the full approach on our methodology page.
Alternatives to ElevenLabs during an outage
If ElevenLabs is down and you need to keep producing, a few peer tools can cover related work. Suno is a strong option for AI music and audio generation. Runway covers AI video and creative media workflows. Stability AI offers generative media across formats. None is a drop-in replacement for ElevenLabs voices, but they can keep a project moving. Before you switch, confirm the backup is healthy on its own status page, since AI providers sometimes have overlapping incidents, and you do not want to trade one outage for another.
ElevenLabs: web app versus the API
ElevenLabs serves two very different audiences from one platform. The web app handles text to speech, voice cloning, dubbing, and project editing in the browser, while the API drives the same speech and voice features programmatically for developers. The two can fail independently: the dashboard may load fine while API calls return errors, or vice versa. Your monthly character quota applies across both, so heavy generation in one place can leave the other blocked.
Typical issues split along that web versus API line:
- On the web app: sign-in problems, audio that fails to generate or play back, dubbing or cloning jobs that stall, and a quota that is exhausted for the month.
- On the API: HTTP 401 from a bad or revoked key, 429 when you exceed rate limits or run out of characters, and 5xx errors during a backend incident.
- Voice cloning specifically can reject samples or fail to train when uploads are too short, noisy, or temporarily unprocessable.
If only your integration is failing, verify your API key and remaining character balance before assuming an outage. The live verdict above reflects platform-wide reachability rather than account-specific limits.