Status page & incidents

When something seems wrong with your sending, the first question is always the same: is it Bird, or is it me? Bird's status page answers the first half. This article explains how to read it, what to expect during an incident, and how to work out whether a problem is platform-wide or specific to your account or domain.

Reading the status page

Bird's status page shows the current health of each platform component — the API, the dashboard, and delivery per channel and region — so you can check the piece you actually depend on rather than a single overall light. Each component shows one of a few states:

Operational — working normally.
Degraded performance — working, but slower than usual. Sends are accepted; delivery may lag.
Partial outage — some requests or some regions affected.
Major outage — the component is down for most or all users.

Active incidents appear at the top of the page with a severity, the affected components, and a running timeline of updates. Past incidents stay visible in the history, each ending with a resolution note.

Subscribing to incident notifications

You don't need to poll the page. The status page lets you subscribe to notifications — email and feed-based options are available — so you're told when an incident opens, when there's a material update, and when it's resolved. If Bird's availability matters to your own operations, subscribe your on-call channel rather than one person's inbox.

What an incident means for your sending

Here's the part that surprises people in a good way: for email, a platform incident usually means delayed delivery, not lost mail. Email is store-and-forward by design — when Bird accepts a send (your API call returns success), the message is durably queued. If delivery is degraded, accepted messages wait in the queue and go out when the incident resolves. You generally don't need to detect the incident and re-send; re-sending typically just produces duplicates after recovery.

What you may see during an incident, depending on which component is affected:

Delivery degraded — sends are accepted normally, but messages reach inboxes later than usual. Queued mail drains automatically after resolution.
API degraded or down — new send requests may be slow or fail. Failed API calls were not accepted, so those are the ones to retry (with backoff).
Dashboard degraded — sending is unaffected; you just can't see it. The dashboard is a window onto the platform, not part of the delivery path.

How Bird communicates during an incident

Incidents follow a consistent rhythm: an initial post when the problem is confirmed (what's affected, what's known), updates as investigation and mitigation progress, and a resolution note when service is restored. For significant incidents, a post-incident review follows with the cause and what's being done to prevent recurrence. The timeline on the status page is the single source of truth — support will point you to the same incident entry.

Platform problem or just you?

Most delivery problems are not platform incidents — they're account-side issues like an unverified domain or suppressed recipients. Work through this order:

Check the status page. If there's an active incident covering your channel and region, that's your answer: expect delays, don't re-send accepted messages, and watch the incident for updates.
Check your domain's verification status. A domain whose DNS records broke stops sending regardless of platform health — the domain's page in the dashboard shows each record's status.
Check your Metrics page. If sends are being accepted but bouncing or being deferred, the metrics and event logs show the pattern — and whether it's one mailbox provider, one domain, or everything.

If the status page is green and your own checks come up clean, start with the delivery delays troubleshooting article — it walks through the account-side causes in order of likelihood. If your sending has been deliberately slowed or stopped, see throttled or paused sending instead.

Delivery delays — the account-side checks to run when mail is slow
Throttled or paused sending — what it means when Bird slows or stops your sending