OpenRouter Outages on February 17 and 19, 2026

OpenRouter experienced two outages on February 17 and 19, 2026, due to failures in a third-party caching dependency, which led to significant API request failures and user confusion over returned error codes. The outages, initially misattributed to a denial-of-service attack, caused the caching layer to disconnect from the database, invalidating cache entries and overwhelming the database with sudden lookup demands. This resulted in 500 and 401 errors, the latter misleadingly suggesting user authentication issues. In response, OpenRouter implemented circuit breaker mechanisms to mitigate the impact of caching failures, began returning more accurate error codes to differentiate between infrastructure issues and authentication problems, and coordinated with the caching provider to address the root failure. Moving forward, OpenRouter plans to introduce a fallback caching mechanism to enhance system resilience against future caching layer downtimes, reinforcing its commitment to providing reliable AI inference infrastructure.

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