Heroku is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) built on AWS that pioneered simple cloud application deployment with its iconic 'git push heroku main' workflow. Despite reduced investment from Salesforce in recent years, Heroku still hosts hundreds of thousands of applications across hobby projects, startups, and enterprise deployments. The platform provides managed dynos (containers), Heroku Postgres, Redis, and a marketplace of add-ons for logging, monitoring, and other services. Heroku's free tier removal in 2022 shifted many developers to alternatives, but its simplicity continues to attract users who prioritize deployment ease.
Heroku outages typically involve the routing mesh that distributes HTTP requests across dynos, Heroku Postgres database availability issues, or the build system that compiles and deploys application slugs. Dyno restarts during platform maintenance can cause brief request failures. The Heroku API and Dashboard may experience independent outages from the runtime platform. Since Heroku runs on AWS, underlying AWS infrastructure failures in US-East cascade into Heroku availability issues for applications in the common runtime.
When Heroku goes down, deployed applications return 503 or H12 timeout errors to users. New deployments cannot be pushed, and existing applications may restart unexpectedly. Heroku Postgres database connections drop, causing data access failures across dependent applications. Add-on services provided by third parties may continue working independently, but the Heroku routing layer prevents traffic from reaching applications during platform-level outages.
Use this page to check Heroku availability. Heroku outages can affect the runtime, database, or build system independently. Check status.heroku.com for the official per-component status page. If your app shows H12 or H13 error codes, it may be a platform issue rather than an application problem.
The generic 'Application Error' page can indicate a Heroku platform outage, a crashed application process, or exceeded memory limits. Check 'heroku logs --tail' for specific error messages. If your logs show H10 (App crashed), it is an application-level issue. If logs show H99 (Platform error), it is a Heroku infrastructure problem.
Heroku's paid infrastructure remains operational and maintained by Salesforce. However, reduced investment compared to competitors like Railway and Render has led some developers to question long-term reliability. For production workloads, Heroku's Eco and Basic dynos provide adequate reliability with the SLA-backed Performance and Private Space dynos offering higher guarantees.
Railway and Render are the most popular Heroku alternatives, offering similar PaaS simplicity with modern features. Fly.io provides edge deployment capabilities. For larger applications, consider AWS Elastic Beanstalk or Google Cloud Run. Each alternative has different strengths depending on your deployment complexity and scaling requirements.
Monitor your Heroku application URL with PinusX Uptime Monitor for free. Get Slack and email alerts within 60 seconds of any downtime. This provides independent verification outside Heroku's infrastructure and catches issues faster than Heroku's own status page updates. PinusX detects both platform outages and application crashes.
Monitor Heroku uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.