Is Kimi Down? How to Check Kimi K3 API Status

Your agent has been running fine all morning. Then three tool calls in a row come back empty, the terminal prints a 500, and you are staring at a wall wondering whether to debug your prompt or wait it out. Checking Kimi status should take ten seconds, but Moonshot has no public status page, so most people end up searching, finding nothing, and rewriting a request that was never broken.

LLM Gateway measures Kimi K3 from the outside — every request that actually leaves for an upstream provider, in the last four hours. That gives you a per-provider answer instead of a guess.

Check Kimi K3 status first

The live Kimi K3 uptime page shows every provider serving the model right now, each with:

• Uptime percent — share of requests that completed successfully upstream
• Time to first token — the number you feel in an interactive agent
• Throughput — tokens per second once the stream starts
• Error rate — how often the provider is failing outright

The window is the last four hours, refreshed every minute. That is deliberately short: a 30-day uptime average will read 99.4% in the middle of an outage and tell you nothing about whether to keep typing.

Every model in the catalogue has the same page. Swap the slug for whatever you are running — pick any entry in the model catalogue and add /uptime to its URL.

Tell a provider outage from your own bad request

The uptime number excludes client errors on purpose. A 4xx caused by your own request — a malformed tool schema, an oversized image, an unsupported parameter — is not the provider failing, and folding it in would make every reliability chart a measure of user mistakes.

That exclusion is what makes the page diagnostic. Read it like this:

Kimi K3 is not a single endpoint

This is the part most status checks miss. Kimi K3 is served by Moonshot and by several independent hosts, and they do not fail together. "Is Kimi down" is really one question per provider, and the answer is usually "one of them is." The uptime page lists whichever hosts are serving it today, so you never have to keep that list in your head.

When you send a request without pinning a provider, the gateway scores the live options on uptime, latency, and throughput, and sends the request to a healthy one. A provider going dark becomes a routing decision rather than an incident you have to notice.

If you want the opposite behaviour while debugging — a hard failure instead of a silent reroute — pin the provider and turn fallback off:

1curl https://api.llmgateway.io/v1/chat/completions \2  -H "Authorization: Bearer $LLM_GATEWAY_API_KEY" \3  -H "x-no-fallback: true" \4  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \5  -d '{6    "model": "moonshot/kimi-k3",7    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "ping"}]8  }'

1curl https://api.llmgateway.io/v1/chat/completions \2  -H "Authorization: Bearer $LLM_GATEWAY_API_KEY" \3  -H "x-no-fallback: true" \4  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \5  -d '{6    "model": "moonshot/kimi-k3",7    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "ping"}]8  }'

That is the honest test of one provider. Drop the header and the model prefix, and you are back to whichever host is healthiest.

What to do while a provider is degraded

• Change nothing. With fallback on, a single failing host is already handled. Most "Kimi is down" reports are one provider, not the model.
• Switch models for the session. If every host is struggling, an open-weight alternative keeps the agent moving. Same key, same endpoint, one string changes.
• Read the error body, not just the status code. Upstream errors are passed through rather than flattened, so the provider's own message tells you whether it is capacity, a content filter, or a bad parameter.
• Check your own history. The dashboard logs every request with the provider that served it, so you can see exactly when the failures started and which host they came from.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Moonshot publish a Kimi status page?

Not a public one covering the API. The practical substitute is measured uptime from a client that sends real traffic — which is what the Kimi K3 uptime page reports, broken out by provider.

Why is Kimi K3 up for someone else but down for me?

Almost always because you are on different providers. The same model ID can resolve to Moonshot for one caller and an independent host for another, and their incidents are unrelated.

How is uptime measured?

It is the share of requests that completed successfully on the upstream provider over the last four hours. Client errors from your own request and gateway-side errors are both excluded, so the figure reflects provider reliability.

Will failover slow my requests down?

Only the failed attempt costs you. Routing scores providers before the request goes out, so healthy traffic is not retried — and a provider that is timing out is scored down before it becomes your default.

Getting started

• Try LLM Gateway free — one key for Kimi K3 and 200+ models, with per-provider routing built in
• Kimi K3 uptime and latency — live provider status, updated every minute
• Setting it up? See How to Use Kimi K3 with Claude Code, Cursor, and Cline
• Curious how routing decides? Read How We Handle LLM Provider Failover at Scale