Clerk is a developer-first authentication and user management platform providing embeddable UI components, pre-built authentication flows, and comprehensive user management APIs. Designed for modern React, Next.js, and other JavaScript frameworks, Clerk handles sign-up, sign-in, multi-factor authentication, social OAuth, passwordless login, organization management, and user profiles through drop-in components. The platform has gained rapid adoption among Next.js developers who value its seamless integration with server components, middleware-based route protection, and developer experience that eliminates the need to build authentication from scratch.
Clerk outages primarily affect the authentication API that validates session tokens and processes login requests. Common causes include API infrastructure capacity constraints during traffic surges, database replication lag affecting user session validation, and OAuth provider connectivity issues when upstream social login providers experience problems. JWKS (JSON Web Key Set) endpoint failures prevent applications from validating tokens locally, causing widespread session invalidation. Clerk's middleware-based authentication means API failures can block entire application access.
When Clerk goes down, every application using Clerk for authentication is immediately affected. Users cannot sign in, sign up, or maintain active sessions. Because Clerk's middleware validates sessions on every request in Next.js applications, an outage can make entire applications inaccessible, not just authentication pages. Organization switching fails, user profile updates halt, and any route protected by Clerk middleware returns errors. The blast radius is significant for applications that rely on Clerk for all access control decisions.
Use this page to check Clerk availability. Clerk outages directly prevent users from logging into applications that depend on it. Check status.clerk.com for official per-component status. If your application returns authentication errors for all users simultaneously, check Clerk's status before debugging your own code.
Sign-in failures may result from Clerk platform outages, misconfigured authentication settings, expired API keys, or upstream OAuth provider issues. If all sign-in methods fail simultaneously, it is likely a Clerk infrastructure problem. If only social logins fail, the upstream provider (Google, GitHub, etc.) may be experiencing issues.
If you use Clerk's middleware for route protection, yes — an outage can make your entire application return errors because every request passes through authentication validation. Consider implementing graceful degradation that serves cached or public content when Clerk is unreachable, rather than blocking all access completely.
Cache JWKS keys locally so token validation can continue during brief outages. Implement fallback behavior in your Clerk middleware that serves degraded functionality rather than blocking all access. Use longer session token lifetimes to reduce dependency on the authentication API for active users. Monitor Clerk's status proactively with PinusX.
Monitor Clerk's authentication API endpoints with PinusX Uptime Monitor for free. Get Slack and email alerts within 60 seconds when authentication services become unavailable. This is critical for user-facing applications where authentication failures immediately translate to blocked users and support tickets.
Monitor Clerk uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.