We ranked 16 LLM API providers by real-world reliability over the last 90 days, using 368 status page incidents and our own around-the-clock uptime checks. Small businesses increasingly build chatbots, document processing and internal automations on an LLM API, so a provider outage takes those features down for customers and staff at the same time. Incidents are often limited to one model or region and show up as elevated errors, slow responses or rate limiting rather than a full outage. Your app inherits the provider's reliability, so its incident history is worth checking before you build on it.
Most reliable LLM API provider:Perplexity API (score 93.8/100). Highest uptime: DeepSeek API (100%). Fewest incidents: Cohere (2 in 90 days). Fastest to resolve: Perplexity API (avg 36m).
#
Vendor
Score
Uptime (90d)
Incidents
Avg resolve
Transparency
Status now
1
Perplexity APIThe Perplexity API (Sonar) gives developers access to Perplexity's search-grounded answer models.Visit site ↗
93.8
99.94%
3 (1 major)
36m
100/100
Operational
2
CohereCohere provides enterprise language models for chat, embeddings and reranking through its API and private deployments.Visit site ↗
91.6
99.94%
2 (1 major)
2h 40m
100/100
Operational
3
GroqGroq runs open models on its own LPU inference hardware and sells access through the GroqCloud API.Visit site ↗
91.4
99.94%
3 (1 major)
2h 16m
100/100
Operational
4
Cerebras InferenceCerebras Inference serves open models on Cerebras wafer-scale hardware through an OpenAI-compatible API.Visit site ↗
89.3
99.88%
2 (1 major)
2h 29m
100/100
Operational
5
xAI APIThe xAI API gives developers access to xAI's Grok models.Visit site ↗
82.0
99.76%
5 (5 major)
1h 10m
100/100
Operational
6
DeepSeek APIThe DeepSeek API gives developers OpenAI-compatible access to DeepSeek's chat and reasoning models.Visit site ↗
76.2
100%
25 (3 major)
—
100/100
Operational
7
Mistral APIThe Mistral API (La Plateforme) gives developers access to Mistral AI's open and commercial models, including chat, embeddings, OCR and audio.Visit site ↗
72.0
99.63%
16 (5 major)
1h 9m
100/100
Operational
8
OpenRouterOpenRouter is an API gateway that routes requests to hundreds of models from many providers through one OpenAI-compatible endpoint.Visit site ↗
62.9
99.44%
10 (2 major)
6h 48m
100/100
Operational
9
OpenAI APIThe OpenAI API gives developers paid access to OpenAI's GPT, image, audio and embedding models.Visit site ↗
49.0
98.73%
35 (1 major)
6h 8m
100/100
Operational
10
Fireworks AIFireworks AI is an inference platform for running and fine-tuning open models through an API.Visit site ↗
44.0
98.04%
231 (2 major)
53m
100/100
Operational
11
Anthropic APIThe Anthropic API (Claude Platform) gives developers paid access to Anthropic's Claude models.Visit site ↗
36.9
97.53%
36 (23 major)
3h 34m
100/100
Operational
LLM API Providers reliability at a glance
Across the 11 ranked LLM API providers, average 90-day uptime is 99.35%. Reliability scores range from 93.8 (Perplexity API) to 36.9 (Anthropic API).
Together they published 368 incidents in the last 90 days, 45 of them partial or major outages.
The typical vendor takes 2h 22m to resolve an incident. Perplexity API is fastest, at 36m on average.
Fireworks AI reported the most incidents (231 in 90 days).
What to check before you choose a LLM API provider
Check incidents for the specific models you plan to use. AI status pages often report problems model by model, so a platform-wide count can hide how often your model fails.
Plan a fallback before you need it: retries with backoff, and the ability to switch to a second model or provider, directly or through a router, when error rates rise.
Treat latency and rate-limit incidents as seriously as outages. Slow or throttled responses can break a chat widget or automation just as badly as errors.
Ask whether the provider offers an uptime SLA, regional endpoints or reserved capacity, and subscribe to its status page or RSS feed.
90-day uptime history
Each bar is one day. Hover a bar for that day's uptime and incidents.
These vendors join the ranking once we have enough evidence: at least 14 days of data, and for vendors with a quiet status page (silent for a year, or for 90 days while their competitors report several incidents), 30 days of our own independent monitoring.
Amazon Bedrock · quiet status page, awaiting our own monitoring
Azure OpenAI · quiet status page, awaiting our own monitoring
Based on the last 90 days of data, Perplexity API is the most reliable LLM API provider we track, with a reliability score of 93.8/100 and 99.94% uptime.
How do you measure LLM API provider reliability?
We poll each vendor's public status page every few minutes, record every incident, and run our own uptime checks against each vendor's login and customer-facing pages. Uptime (40%), incident frequency (20%), average time to resolve (20%) and transparency (20%) combine into one score out of 100.
How often are these rankings updated?
Continuously. Status pages and uptime checks run every five minutes and scores are recalculated several times an hour.
Can vendors pay to rank higher?
No. Sponsored placements are clearly labelled, shown separately from the rankings and never change a vendor's score.