SendGrid Status Monitoring: How to Track Email Delivery Outages

When SendGrid goes down, your transactional emails stop reaching customers. Password resets fail. Order confirmations vanish. Support tickets never arrive. By the time you notice, customers are already complaining.

For DevOps and SRE teams, checking SendGrid status shouldn't be a manual process. It shouldn't wait until customers report it either. For a team sending 10,000 transactional emails per day, a 15-minute outage means roughly 100 emails that never arrived. Password resets, order confirmations, 2FA codes. Most recipients won't retry. They will contact support, or leave. That's the difference between "we're already fixing it" and "wait, emails aren't working?"

This guide covers how to monitor SendGrid's service status effectively, detect outages early, and set up alerts before your customers notice problems.

Why SendGrid Outages Matter More Than You Think

SendGrid handles billions of emails monthly for companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Spotify. When it degrades or goes offline, the impact cascades fast. The AWS CloudFront outage in February 2026 took down 20+ services in minutes and shows exactly how quickly these situations escalate.

Common SendGrid failure modes:

• API rate limiting without warning
• SMTP relay delays (emails queued for 10+ minutes)
• Specific IP reputation blocks causing delivery failures
• Dashboard showing "operational" while emails aren't sending
• Regional outages affecting only certain sending domains

Official status pages sometimes update slowly. By the time they acknowledge an incident, you've already lost time.

How to Monitor SendGrid Status in Real Time

1. Track SendGrid's Official Status Page

SendGrid maintains a status page at https://status.sendgrid.com. It reports incidents across:

• API
• SMTP Relay
• Email Activity Feed
• Webhook Event Delivery
• Marketing Campaigns

Limitation: Status updates lag reality by 5 to 15 minutes. SendGrid often marks services as "operational" while teams report delivery failures.

2. Use IsDown for SendGrid Monitoring

IsDown monitors SendGrid's status page and aggregates real-time user reports to detect outages faster than official channels.

In January 2026, IsDown detected outages up to 2.2 hours before vendors acknowledged them, and caught 101 incidents that vendors never reported at all. Thousands of DevOps and SRE teams use IsDown to monitor SendGrid and hundreds of other SaaS vendors in one place. Check SendGrid's live status in IsDown. Free to start, no credit card required.

Set up alerts in under 2 minutes:

1. Create an account with IsDown
2. Start Monitoring SendGrid
3. Go to alerts & Integration and choose notification method (email, Slack, webhook, PagerDuty, etc.)
4. Receive instant alerts when SendGrid has problems

3. Monitor Your Own Email Delivery Metrics

External monitoring is reactive. Proactive teams also track their own SendGrid metrics:

Key metrics to watch:

• Delivery rate: Should stay above 95%. A drop below 90% means customers are missing critical emails right now, and most won't tell you directly.
• Bounce rate: Spikes indicate emails are being rejected outright. Customers never receive them, and you may not know for hours.
• API response time: SendGrid's API should respond in under 200ms. Latency above 500ms means your application is waiting, and emails are queuing up silently.
• Queue depth: A growing outbound queue means SendGrid isn't keeping up. Emails are delayed, not lost yet, but the window to act is closing.

Build dashboards in Grafana, Datadog, or New Relic that alert when these metrics cross thresholds.

Not sure if the problem is your setup or SendGrid itself? Check SendGrid's live status in IsDown before diving into your dashboards.

4. Set Up Synthetic Email Tests

Send test emails through SendGrid every 5 minutes to a monitored inbox. If they don't arrive within 2 minutes, you know SendGrid is degraded before real customer emails fail.

Synthetic email testing and vendor status monitoring solve different problems. Synthetic tests tell you if your own implementation is working. IsDown tells you if SendGrid itself is the problem. Both layers together mean you always know where to look first.

Tools for synthetic monitoring:

• Pingdom (email transaction checks)
• UptimeRobot (SMTP monitoring)
• Custom scripts using SendGrid's API and a monitoring inbox

For vendor status monitoring, IsDown covers SendGrid and every other SaaS dependency in one place.

See SendGrid's current status in IsDown. Free to start, no credit card required.

What to Do When SendGrid Goes Down

The worst part of a SendGrid outage isn't the technical failure. It's realizing your customers found out before you did. Here's how to move fast.

Immediate actions (first 5 minutes):

1. Check IsDown's SendGrid status for reported incidents
2. Verify it's not your API key, domain authentication, or IP reputation
3. Check SendGrid's official status page for acknowledgment
4. Alert your team via Slack or PagerDuty

Next steps (minutes 5 to 15):

1. If SendGrid confirms an outage, activate your email failover plan (if you have one)
2. Queue non-critical emails for later delivery
3. Post customer-facing incident notice if password resets or order confirmations are affected
4. Monitor SendGrid's incident updates for ETA

After the outage:

1. Review queued emails and retry any that failed
2. Check bounce logs for emails that hard-failed during the outage
3. Document impact (number of emails delayed, customer complaints, revenue impact)
4. Evaluate whether you need a backup email provider for critical transactional emails

Need a framework for documenting what happened? A blameless postmortem helps teams learn from outages without assigning blame.

When to Add a Backup Email Provider

If SendGrid outages are frequent, consider diversifying your email infrastructure.

Alternative email providers:

• Mailgun: Strong API, historically fewer community-reported outages than SendGrid. Monitor Mailgun status alongside SendGrid in IsDown.
• Postmark: Built for transactional email, excellent uptime record. Monitor Postmark status alongside SendGrid in IsDown.
• Amazon SES: Lower cost, more complex setup, good reliability. Monitor AWS SES status alongside SendGrid in IsDown.
• Resend: Developer-focused, newer player, growing fast. Monitor Resend status alongside SendGrid in IsDown.

Many teams use SendGrid for bulk marketing emails and Postmark for critical transactional emails (password resets, 2FA codes). This reduces the impact when one provider fails. Critical emails keep flowing even if your bulk sender goes down.

Recommended setup:

1. IsDown alerts: Instant notifications when SendGrid incidents are detected or reported
2. Synthetic tests: Automated email sending every 5 minutes through a tool like Pingdom or UptimeRobot to catch failures fast
3. Delivery dashboards: Real-time metrics on send rate, bounce rate, and API latency
4. Runbook: Documented steps for what to do when SendGrid goes down

With monitoring in place, you detect problems in minutes instead of hours. The teams that get there first are the ones that set this up before the next outage.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is SendGrid down right now? Check SendGrid's live status in IsDown for real-time incident reports and user-reported issues. IsDown detects outages up to hours before the official status page acknowledges them.

Why are my SendGrid emails not sending? There are four common causes: a SendGrid infrastructure issue, an IP reputation problem, an API key or authentication error, or a queue backlog. Check IsDown's SendGrid status first to rule out a platform-wide issue before investigating your own setup.

How long do SendGrid outages typically last? Most SendGrid incidents resolve within 30 to 90 minutes. API and SMTP relay issues tend to be shorter. Marketing campaign delivery issues can persist longer.

Does SendGrid have a status page? Yes, SendGrid maintains an official status page at https://status.sendgrid.com.

Get Instant SendGrid Outage Alerts

Track SendGrid alongside every other critical SaaS vendor in one dashboard. One place to know what's down, what's degraded, and what your team needs to act on.

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