The 30-second check
Do these two things before touching your router. First, open the official status page at status.janitorai.com; Janitor’s own help center points there for exactly this question. Second, open r/JanitorAI_Official sorted by new: during a real outage the front page fills with reports within minutes, and the moderators post updates there and on the official Discord while fixes run.
One thing the green banner does not tell you: the official page runs exactly two HTTP monitors, Backend and Frontend, over a 45-day window. It answers “does the site respond”, not “do chats work”. The site can serve pages while the model layer chokes, which is why users report broken chats, dead search, or an unloadable My Chats page under an “All Systems Operational” banner. Green plus a wall of fresh subreddit reports means believe the subreddit.
If both look quiet and Janitor still fails for you, the problem is probably on your side of the wire, or on your proxy provider’s. The table below sorts it.
Down for everyone, or just you?
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Site will not load at all, subreddit filling with reports | Real outage. Wait; nothing local fixes it. |
| 502 Bad Gateway or internal server error on the main site | Server-side failure. Both logged April 2026 incidents were 502s. |
| Site loads, chats error, you use a custom proxy | Test the built-in JLLM. If JLLM answers and your model does not, your provider is down, not Janitor. |
| Site loads, JLLM chats crawl or time out at evening peak | Load, not outage. Users consistently report the built-in model slowing at peak; a proxied model usually keeps working. |
| ”Can not find this character. It might be deleted or set to private.” | Not an outage. The card was deleted or made private. |
| Site works on desktop, the app spins forever | App-side cache. Fix in the app section below. |
The JLLM-versus-proxy split matters because Janitor chats run on one of two engines: the free built-in JanitorLLM, or an outside model you connected yourself. They fail independently. No status checker on this SERP makes that distinction, which is how “Janitor is down!!” threads end up full of people whose actual outage was their model provider.
While it’s down: two tested apps that are up
An outage is a bad time to start a setup project, so both picks here work out of the box: no API keys, no proxy, no model shopping. They are the two paid apps from my JanitorAI alternatives ranking, and the only claim I make for them is the narrow one that matters tonight: they are up when you want them, and I have the receipts because I paid for both.
Candy AI had the strongest texting of my whole test cycle: characters that push back, escalate on their own, and never tripped a filter in my explicit sessions. The $13.99 plan has unlimited messages on a flat price, and the free taste is about 5 messages, enough to know whether the writing is your taste before an outage-night impulse buy.
OurDream AI is the pick if the thing you are afraid of losing is your characters. Its official character import page accepts V2 and PNG cards, so the cast you built on Janitor can move with you instead of waiting out the outage; it runs $19.99 a month with 55 one-time free coins to test on, scene-direction controls, and working video.
If you want to stay in the free card-platform world instead, the alternatives page ranks eight of them by what pushed you out; SpicyChat and CrushOn are the usual outage refuges, queues and caps included.
What the record actually shows
Nobody ranking for this search publishes a usable outage history, including the official page, which shows a 45-day window and, at this writing, no events. Here is what the third-party record holds for 2026, with each source named, since none of it is my own monitoring:
| When | What was logged | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Jan 1, Jan 4, Jan 27, 2026 | Resolved outages of 30, 45, and 55 minutes | Entireweb status log |
| Apr 15, 2026 | 502 Bad Gateway, about 1 minute | UptimeRobot monitor |
| Apr 17, 2026 | 502 Bad Gateway, about 35 seconds | UptimeRobot monitor |
| May 28 to Jul 27, 2026 | Eight user-report clusters, no confirmed downtime | StatusGator user reports |
| Nov 2025 | Maintenance after “unexpected load”, announced on Discord | GetAssist forum thread |
Community history adds the worst case: in one past takedown the moderators posted that “The site is down due DDoS attack” while the developer worked through it, signed by Team Janitor on the official subreddit. The pattern across all of it: most incidents are minutes long, the hour-long ones are rarer, and multi-hour outages are memorable precisely because they are exceptions.
Fixes that match the symptom
Cache-clearing is not a ritual that fixes servers, so match the fix to the diagnosis:
- Confirmed outage (status page red, subreddit on fire): wait. Follow the subreddit or Discord thread for the all-clear; nothing on your device helps.
- Proxied chats failing, JLLM fine: your provider is down or your key is exhausted. Every error code from 401 to 503 has a specific meaning and fix in my Janitor AI proxy guide.
- JLLM crawling at evening peak: wait it out or switch that chat to a proxied model; peak load is the one problem a proxy reliably routes around.
- Site fine on desktop, app stuck loading: clear the app’s own data. A community-shared path that works: long-press the app icon, open site settings, and clear data, or go through Settings, Apps, Janitor AI, Clear Cache.
- Everything green but your browser still fails: now the boring steps earn their keep: another browser or network, extensions off, VPN off. If a different network works, the issue was between you and the site, not the site.
Why the status checkers disagree with each other
Search this query and you will meet a dozen “is it down” pages contradicting each other. There are structural reasons to trust none of them blindly. Two of the checkers ranking on page one describe JanitorAI as janitorial-management or customer-support software; they have never looked at the product they monitor. One rates its own Janitor data quality “F - Failing” in public. A blog ranking for this query hardcodes the answer that users “are having trouble using Janitor AI at this moment” into a static page, which therefore says so every day of the year. And the X account literally named “is JanitorAI down?” is a third-party tracker, not the company; the brand’s own account is a separate handle. The official status page, the help center, the subreddit, and the Discord are the four sources that actually belong to Janitor.
Bookmark those four, plus the table above for the just-you cases, and the next “is it down” panic costs you 30 seconds instead of an evening. If the outage outlasts your patience, the two tested apps are up, and your characters can travel.