Twilio is the leading cloud communications platform, powering programmatic voice calls, SMS messages, video, and email for over 300,000 businesses worldwide. The platform processes billions of messages annually through its APIs, which developers integrate to build two-factor authentication, appointment reminders, customer support systems, and marketing campaigns. Twilio's acquisition of SendGrid added transactional and marketing email capabilities, making it a comprehensive communication infrastructure provider.
Twilio outages typically affect specific communication channels independently — SMS delivery may degrade while voice calls continue functioning. Common causes include carrier connectivity issues affecting message routing, API gateway overload during high-volume sending periods, and authentication service failures. International message delivery can fail due to aggregator issues in specific countries. Twilio's Verify (2FA) service outages particularly impact user login flows across thousands of applications.
When Twilio is down, businesses lose the ability to send SMS, make automated voice calls, or deliver two-factor authentication codes. This directly impacts user login security for apps using SMS-based 2FA — users literally cannot log in. Customer communication workflows break, appointment reminders fail to send, and marketing campaigns stall. For businesses relying on Twilio for critical notifications like fraud alerts or delivery updates, outages have immediate operational consequences.
Use this page to check Twilio API availability. Twilio's different services (SMS, Voice, Verify, Video) can experience independent outages. Check status.twilio.com for component-level status and specific incident details by communication channel and region.
SMS delivery failures can result from Twilio outages, carrier filtering, invalid phone numbers, or account suspension. Check your Twilio console message logs for specific error codes. If messages show as 'sent' but aren't arriving, it may be a carrier delivery issue rather than a Twilio outage. International SMS is more prone to delivery issues than domestic.
When Twilio Verify is down, users cannot receive SMS or voice verification codes, effectively locking them out of apps that require 2FA. This is why many security experts recommend offering backup 2FA methods like authenticator apps (TOTP) alongside SMS-based verification. Consider implementing fallback authentication methods.
Twilio maintains a 99.95% uptime SLA for most services. SMS delivery rates are typically above 98% domestically. However, international SMS delivery varies significantly by country and carrier. For critical communications, implement delivery receipt tracking, retry logic, and consider using multiple delivery channels.
Monitor Twilio's API endpoints with PinusX Uptime Monitor for instant alerts. Track the SMS API and Verify API separately since they can fail independently. Get Slack notifications within 60 seconds of any disruption so you can switch to backup communication channels or display fallback messages to users.
Monitor Twilio uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.