First, confirm it is actually SendGrid and not your store. Then contain the damage and communicate. Here is exactly how to do that during a SendGrid outage, plus what usually breaks and how long incidents tend to last.
How do I confirm SendGrid is actually down?
Check two independent sources before changing anything in your store. First, StatusBird's live SendGrid status page, which is based on independent checks every 2 minutes. Second, SendGrid's own status page at status.sendgrid.com. If the official page still shows green, do not assume you are wrong: vendors often acknowledge incidents well after they start. If both look clean, the problem is more likely your store's configuration or a specific integration.
What does a SendGrid outage look like?
- Customers report missing order confirmations and password reset emails
- SendGrid API calls return errors or time out in application logs
- The SendGrid dashboard activity feed shows no recent processed mail
- Emails show as processed or deferred but never reach inboxes
- Open, click, and bounce webhook events stop arriving
What breaks in your store
When SendGrid goes down, transactional email silently stops: customers place orders but never receive confirmations, password reset emails never arrive so customers cannot log in, and shipping notifications stall. Depending on the incident, API calls may be rejected outright (mail is never accepted) or accepted but queued with long delivery delays, and those two modes need different responses. Marketing sends scheduled through SendGrid also stall, and event webhooks stop updating your engagement data. The result customers see is a store that appears to have ignored them.
For context, SendGrid has had no major incidents in the last 90 days of StatusBird's independent monitoring (100.0% availability), so a real outage is unusual. That makes it easy to mistake one for a problem on your end, which is why confirming first matters.
What to do during the outage
- Check status.sendgrid.com to determine whether mail is being rejected or accepted-but-delayed, since that dictates whether you must resend.
- Fail over transactional email to a backup provider such as Postmark, Mailgun, or Amazon SES if you have one configured.
- Log every email your app fails to hand off so you can replay order confirmations and resets after recovery.
- Handle urgent password resets and order questions manually through support while email is down.
- Post a banner or order-confirmation-page note telling customers email confirmations are delayed but orders went through.
Frequently asked questions
Customers say they never got their order confirmation. Did their orders actually go through?
Almost certainly yes. SendGrid only delivers the email; the order itself was created in your store before the confirmation send was attempted. Check your store's order list to confirm, tell worried customers their order is safe, and resend confirmations once email delivery recovers.
Do I need to resend all the emails from the outage window?
It depends on the failure mode. If SendGrid accepted the messages but delivery was delayed, they will usually flush through on their own and resending causes duplicates. If your API calls were rejected, those emails were never queued and you must replay them from your own logs. The status page and your application error logs together tell you which case you are in.
After the outage
Once SendGrid recovers, verify the affected workflows end to end rather than trusting the status page. Note the start and end times while they are fresh: if you are on a paid SendGrid plan with an SLA, documented downtime is what a service credit claim is built on. See how to claim SLA credits for the process.
How this data is measured
StatusBird checks SendGrid's status every 2 minutes, around the clock, independently of the vendor. The availability figure counts major and critical outages only; minor degradation is excluded so numbers are not skewed by vendors that report small blips near-continuously. Grades run from A+ to F. See the live numbers on the SendGrid reliability page and current status on the SendGrid status page, or browse all 84 service grades.
Know before your customers do
StatusBird monitors SendGrid and 83 other services online stores depend on, plus your own storefront, every 2 minutes. When something goes down you get an SMS, email, or Slack alert with plain-English context, usually before the official status page catches up. Start monitoring free, no card required for the free plan.