TL;DR: Check status.cursor.com for real-time outage info. Common symptoms of Cursor downtime include autocomplete not firing, chat hanging indefinitely, and error banners in the status bar — but most of the time, these point to a local issue rather than a platform outage.

Cursor AI suddenly went quiet on you. No completions, chat just spinning, or some vague error in the bottom bar. Been there.

Before you start digging through settings or reinstalling the app — check the status page first. Saves a lot of time.

How to Check If Cursor AI Is Down

The official status page is status.cursor.com. That’s your first stop.

It shows real-time operational status for Cursor’s infrastructure:

  • API — the AI model endpoints that power completions and chat
  • Web App — the website and account management
  • Authentication — login and licensing

Green means operational. Yellow means degraded. Red means there’s an active incident. If something’s wrong, you’ll see a banner with details and timestamps as the team works through it.

One important thing to know before you panic: Cursor is built on VS Code. The editor itself runs locally on your machine. An “outage” almost always means the AI features are broken, not the editor. You can still open files, run terminals, use extensions, and write code. You just lose the AI-assisted parts until it resolves.

Third-party checks if you want a second opinion:

Downdetector.com aggregates user reports. A sudden spike on the chart usually means something’s wrong — even if the official page hasn’t caught up yet.

Cursor’s community Discord is also fast. Searching “down” or “outage” in the general channels surfaces problems within minutes of them starting.

Searching cursor AI down on X/Twitter works too. Developers complain loudly and immediately when their tools break.

Common Symptoms That Look Like Downtime — But Aren’t

This is where most troubleshooting time actually goes. When Cursor stops working, the cause is usually local.

Local network issues. Your office WiFi, home router, or ISP can block outbound requests to api.cursor.sh without any obvious error. Try switching networks — mobile hotspot is the fastest test — and see if Cursor comes back.

VPN conflicts. This is a big one. Certain VPN configurations route requests through exit nodes that Cursor’s servers rate-limit or block outright. If you’re on a VPN, disable it temporarily and test. Corporate VPNs are especially common culprits.

Extension conflicts. Less common in Cursor than in pure browser apps, but some VS Code extensions interfere with Cursor’s AI layer. Try launching Cursor with extensions disabled (--disable-extensions in the command palette) to rule this out.

Expired or misconfigured API key. By far the most common “false outage” scenario. Go to Cursor Settings → Models and verify your API key is valid and hasn’t expired. If you’re on a usage-based API plan, check your billing dashboard — hitting your limit looks exactly like an outage.

Free plan completion limit. Cursor’s free tier has monthly limits. When you hit them, completions stop cold. Not an outage. Just the billing cycle.

If status.cursor.com is green and your colleagues’ Cursor is working fine, it’s almost certainly one of these. Check them in order before assuming the service is actually down.

What to Do While Cursor Is Down

If it genuinely is a platform outage — status page shows an active incident — here’s how to keep moving.

Fall back to VS Code + GitHub Copilot. Since Cursor is built on VS Code, this transition is nearly seamless. Open VS Code (or switch to it if you already have it), install GitHub Copilot, and you’ve got inline completions, Copilot Chat, and all your existing keybindings. Copilot runs on GitHub’s infrastructure independently of Cursor’s servers, so it won’t be affected by whatever Cursor is dealing with.

Copilot has a free tier now, so if you haven’t set it up as a backup, it takes about five minutes.

The Continue extension. If you want more flexibility, the Continue extension for VS Code lets you route AI completions through any provider — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or local models. Worth setting up regardless of Cursor’s reliability, honestly.

Offline mode. Cursor’s editor features — file navigation, search and replace, terminal, debugger, git — all work without any server connection. For short outages, you might just write code manually for an hour. Not the end of the world.

Historical Uptime: Cursor Is Generally Reliable

Cursor has scaled fast. Infrastructure has kept up reasonably well, but there have been periods of degraded AI feature performance — usually around major model updates or during peak usage.

True platform-wide outages where everything breaks are rare. More common: partial degradations where AI completions slow down or specific model endpoints have issues while the rest of the service stays up.

Cursor doesn’t offer a formal SLA outside of enterprise agreements, so if you’re running a development shop where AI-assisted coding is deeply embedded in the workflow, having a fallback plan (VS Code + Copilot, or Continue) is just sensible risk management. It’s a startup. Good infrastructure, but plan accordingly.

To get notified automatically: go to status.cursor.com, click “Subscribe to Updates,” and enter your email. You’ll get an alert the moment an incident is posted and another when it’s resolved.

For Cursor problems that aren’t outage-related — autocomplete not showing up, chat giving wrong answers, codebase indexing broken — the Cursor AI troubleshooting guide covers those in detail. And if you’re evaluating whether Cursor is worth adding to your workflow at all, the Cursor AI review has the full breakdown.

FAQ

Is Cursor AI down right now?
Go to status.cursor.com for the only authoritative answer. If there’s an active incident, it’ll show there. If the status page is green and Cursor still isn’t connecting, the issue is almost certainly local — check your API key settings, VPN, and network first.
How often does Cursor AI go down?
True platform-wide Cursor outages are rare. Partial degradations — usually the AI features, not the editor itself — happen occasionally during model updates or periods of heavy traffic. The VS Code base always stays functional locally.
Does Cursor AI have a status page?
Yes. It’s at status.cursor.com. You can subscribe to email alerts there so you’ll know the moment an incident is posted — without having to check manually.
What should I do if Cursor AI is not connecting?
First check status.cursor.com. If it’s green, the problem is local. Check your API key in Cursor Settings > Models, try disabling your VPN, and make sure no firewall is blocking outbound requests to api.cursor.sh. Reinstalling Cursor is rarely necessary but does fix certain persistent auth issues.