CircleCI is a leading continuous integration and continuous delivery platform used by over 30,000 organizations to automate software builds, testing, and deployment. The platform supports both cloud-hosted and self-hosted runners, with parallel execution, Docker layer caching, test splitting, and approval-based deployment workflows. CircleCI processes millions of CI/CD jobs daily across languages and frameworks, integrating with GitHub, Bitbucket, and GitLab for source code triggers. The platform's orbs ecosystem provides reusable configuration packages for common CI/CD patterns.
CircleCI outages typically involve job execution infrastructure failures where builds queue but do not start running, Docker image pull failures from container registries during builds, and credit/billing system errors that incorrectly block paid plans. The January 2023 security incident highlighted supply chain risks in CI/CD platforms. Build cache storage issues cause longer-than-expected build times, and webhook delivery failures break deployment automation triggers from version control systems.
When CircleCI goes down, all automated builds and deployments stop for thousands of engineering teams. Pull request checks cannot run, blocking code merges across organizations. Automated deployment pipelines halt, preventing releases. Test suites do not execute, meaning code changes cannot be validated. For teams without self-hosted runners, there is no fallback — they must wait for CircleCI to recover or manually run tests and deploy from local machines.
Use this page to check CircleCI availability. CircleCI outages primarily affect build execution, meaning jobs queue but do not run. Check status.circleci.com for the official status page with per-component details. If your builds are queuing for extended periods, it may indicate a capacity issue even if the status page shows operational.
Build queuing can result from platform capacity constraints, plan concurrency limits, or resource class availability issues. Check your plan's parallelism and concurrency limits. If queuing affects all customers simultaneously, it is a platform-wide issue. Self-hosted runners bypass cloud capacity constraints but still depend on CircleCI's orchestration layer.
Run critical tests locally using your project's test commands. For urgent deployments, execute deployment scripts manually from a developer machine. Consider maintaining GitHub Actions workflow files as a backup CI/CD path. Document manual deployment procedures in your runbook for when CI/CD platforms are unavailable.
GitHub Actions benefits from GitHub's massive infrastructure but can experience capacity constraints for popular runner types. CircleCI offers more granular resource controls and self-hosted runner options. Both platforms experience occasional outages. The best strategy is having CI/CD configuration portable between platforms for failover.
Monitor CircleCI's API and build execution endpoints with PinusX Uptime Monitor for free. Get Slack and email alerts within 60 seconds when CircleCI becomes unreachable. This gives your team lead time to switch to manual processes or alternative CI/CD platforms before build queues cause deployment delays.
Monitor CircleCI uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.