LLM API Providers · reliability comparison
OpenAI API vs xAI API: which is more reliable? (2026)
xAI API is more reliable than OpenAI API, scoring 82.1 vs 49.1 out of 100. Over the last 90 days OpenAI API reported 35 incidents and xAI API reported 5, with effective uptime of 98.73% and 99.77% respectively. xAI API resolves incidents faster on average (1h 10m).
Data updated Nov 2, 2026 · How we score
| Metric | OpenAI API | xAI API |
|---|---|---|
| Reliability score | 49.1 | 82.1 |
| Rank (LLM API providers) | #9 | #5 |
| Uptime (90 days) | 98.73% | 99.77% |
| Incidents (90 days) | 35 | 5 |
| Partial / major outages | 1 | 5 |
| Avg time to resolve | 6h 8m | 1h 10m |
| Outages we detected | 0 | 0 |
| Transparency score | 100/100 | 100/100 |
Where OpenAI API and xAI API differ
- OpenAI API reported 7× as many incidents as xAI API over the last 90 days (35 vs 5).
- xAI API had 5 partial or major outages, compared with 1 for OpenAI API.
- xAI API fixes problems faster: 1h 10m on average, against 6h 8m for OpenAI API (5.3× quicker).
- OpenAI API's longest outage on record lasted 40m (Sep 15, 2026); xAI API's lasted 3h 39m (Sep 3, 2026).
90-day uptime
OpenAI API
xAI API
- No incidents
- Degraded
- Partial outage
- Major outage
- No data
Recent OpenAI API incidents
- Degraded performanceOct 30, 2026 · resolved in 4h 1m
Elevated errors for GPT Image 2 API image edits
Affected: Images
- Degraded performanceOct 27, 2026 · resolved in 1h 18m
6.1 Sol Degraded Model Performance
Affected: Batch, Chat Completions, Responses
- InformationalOct 27, 2026 · resolved in 29m
- InformationalOct 23, 2026 · resolved in 33m
- InformationalOct 23, 2026 · resolved in 2h 17m
- Degraded performanceOct 22, 2026 · resolved in 6h 32m
Elevated ChatGPT conversation and Responses API errors
Affected: Conversations, Responses
Recent xAI API incidents
- Partial outageOct 24, 2026 · resolved in <1m
- Major outageSep 22, 2026 · resolved in 26m
[Global (api.x.ai)] Outages across API, Grok.com, and Grok Build
- Partial outageSep 10, 2026 · resolved in 12m
- Major outageSep 3, 2026 · resolved in 3h 39m
- Partial outageAug 17, 2026 · resolved in 1h 31m
Other LLM API providers to consider
- Perplexity API · #1 · 99.94% uptime
- Cohere · #2 · 99.94% uptime
- Groq · #3 · 99.94% uptime
- Cerebras Inference · #4 · 99.88% uptime