SendGrid, now owned by Twilio, is the leading transactional and marketing email delivery platform, sending over 100 billion emails annually for businesses of all sizes. The platform provides SMTP relay, a REST API for programmatic email sending, email template design tools, delivery analytics, and automated IP warm-up. SendGrid handles critical transactional emails like password resets, order confirmations, and shipping notifications, as well as bulk marketing campaigns and newsletter distribution.
SendGrid outages typically manifest as email delivery delays rather than complete failures. Common causes include mail transfer agent (MTA) queue congestion during high-volume periods, IP reputation issues affecting deliverability to major inbox providers, API gateway rate limiting, and webhook delivery failures for event notifications. SMTP relay issues can cause silent failures where emails are accepted but not delivered. Dashboard and statistics reporting may lag during infrastructure strain.
When SendGrid is down, transactional emails stop reaching inboxes — password reset flows break, order confirmations are delayed, and critical business notifications fail to deliver. Marketing campaigns pause mid-send, potentially splitting audiences and distorting analytics. For SaaS products that depend on email for user onboarding and engagement, SendGrid outages directly reduce activation rates and customer satisfaction.
Use this page to check SendGrid API availability. SendGrid outages often manifest as delivery delays rather than hard failures — emails may be accepted by the API but queued for extended periods. Check status.sendgrid.com for official status and incident reports including mail delivery queue metrics.
Email delivery failures can result from SendGrid outages, spam filtering by recipient email providers, sender reputation issues, or incorrect DNS configuration (SPF, DKIM, DMARC). Check your SendGrid Activity Feed for specific delivery events. If emails show as 'delivered' but aren't in the inbox, check spam folders — it may be a reputation issue rather than a SendGrid outage.
During normal operations, SendGrid delivers emails within seconds. During incidents, delivery delays can range from minutes to several hours depending on the severity. SendGrid queues emails during outages and delivers them once service resumes, so emails aren't lost — just delayed. Major outages affecting delivery are typically resolved within 2-4 hours.
The SendGrid API (REST) provides faster delivery, better error handling, and richer features like templates and scheduling. SMTP relay is simpler to set up with existing email infrastructure. During outages, API and SMTP can be affected independently — the API may return errors while SMTP accepts messages (or vice versa). Monitor both endpoints for complete coverage.
Set up PinusX Uptime Monitor to check SendGrid's API endpoint for availability. Get Slack and email alerts (from a different provider!) within 60 seconds of any disruption. Also configure SendGrid's Event Webhooks to track delivery, bounces, and opens in real time for ongoing deliverability monitoring.
Monitor SendGrid uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.