Is Brevo Down? How to Check, and What Usually Looks Like an Outage

People search is brevo down about 30 times a month in the United States. Most of the time the honest answer is no: Brevo's status page has been green across its components for months. Most moments when Brevo seems down are account states, and each has a specific cause. This page covers how to check the platform, then the account states that look like an outage.

How to check whether Brevo is down

Start with the vendor's status page at status.brevo.com. When we read it on 9 October 2026 it reported "We’re fully operational" and showed full uptime from July to October 2026 ^[18].

It tracks 34 components in ten groups:

• Marketing: email delivery, tracking links, SMS campaigns, wallet, WhatsApp campaigns, landing pages, statistics and the campaigns API.
• Transactional: email delivery, tracking links, SMTP, transactional SMS and the messaging API.
• Automations: workflows and the Brevo tracker.
• CRM: contacts, the contact management API, the sales CRM and its API.
• Account and settings, Conversations, Commerce, Brevo Data Platform, Integrations and Customer Data Platform.

A problem is usually in one component. If transactional email is delayed but marketing is fine, the status page tells you so. Subscribe to updates if your business depends on it.

The page's incident history was not readable to us, so we can describe the current window and nothing earlier.

## If the status page is green

Then the cause is very likely your account. Work through these in order:

1. A suspension, which stops sending while the dashboard still works.
2. The free plan's daily limit of 300 emails.
3. A contact cap on a paid tier.
4. A failed payment.
5. An inactive free account that has been deleted.
6. An integration or API key problem.

Each is a documented behaviour, not a bug.

Suspension: the most common "outage"

The help centre is explicit: "You won't be able to send emails until your account or email campaigns are reactivated." ^[13] You can still log in, which is why it looks like a platform fault.

Brevo tests early campaigns, especially those to new contacts, on a random subset of recipients. If the results are poor, the campaign and the account are suspended within hours. The published triggers include a hard bounce rate above 2%, unsubscribes above 1% and complaints above 0.2% ^[13].

How to tell: the Deliverability center shows a warning and the reason.

How to fix: for a first suspension after a campaign, follow the Deliverability center's steps to reactivate, and clean the list before sending again. For a suspension right after signup, contact support. A second suspension cannot be reactivated ^[13].

Note that billing continues: "Note that your subscription remains active during the suspension." ^[13]

## The free plan's daily limit

The free plan sends 300 emails a day ^[6]. Once that is used, campaigns stop for the day. For a list larger than 300, "only 300 contacts will receive it on the scheduled day" ^[6], and the rest must be resent manually.

Transactional emails share the same allowance. When it is used, "up to 1,000 additional emails are held in a retry queue. Emails beyond this queue are not delivered." ^[6] So a password reset can fail on a free account because a newsletter used the day's sends.

How to tell: check the day's sending in the account.

How to fix: wait for the daily reset, or upgrade. "Upgrading raises your daily limit right away, but only applies to emails sent after the upgrade." ^[6]

Contact caps on paid tiers

Paid tiers cap stored contacts: 500, 1,500 and 2,500 on the first three Starter and Standard tiers, up to 500,000 from 20,000 emails ^[5]. On those first three tiers, crossing the cap triggers an automatic upgrade ^[8].

If the upgrade cannot be charged, because a card has expired for example, the account can end up unable to add contacts or send as expected.

How to tell: check My plan for the contact count against the tier and any pending charge.

How to fix: update the payment method, or reduce contacts below the cap.

Failed payments

The terms are direct: "We may suspend your access or close your account without prior notice if We remain unable to successfully charge You with the fees applicable to the Services." ^[14]

That makes an expired card one of the more serious causes of an apparent outage. If your plan has expired after a failed payment, the help centre directs you to subscribe again from My plan with a valid payment method, or to contact support to move to the free plan ^[9].

How to tell: check billing in My plan for a failed or overdue invoice.

How to fix: update the card and pay the invoice, or contact support.

An inactive free account

If you cannot log in at all to a free account you have not used for months, it may have been deleted. The cancellation page warns that free users must "log into Brevo every four months to prevent the automatic deletion of your Free account" ^[10]. The terms describe six months, with an email warning first ^[14].

Deletion is permanent. If you rely on a free account for occasional sends, log in every few months.

Integrations and the API

If emails from your website or app stop while campaigns still send, look at the integration.

Check that the API key or SMTP credentials are still valid and have not been regenerated. Check the status page's Transactional and Integrations groups ^[18]. On a free account, check the daily limit.

For WordPress, the official plugin scores 4.1 from 285 ratings ^[16], so most sites run it without trouble; a plugin conflict after an update is a more common cause than a Brevo outage.

For Shopify, note that Brevo's App Store listing currently reads "This app is not currently available on the Shopify App Store." ^[17] If a store integration stopped working, confirm with Brevo which integration path is supported.

Campaigns that seem stuck

A campaign showing as sending for a long time is not necessarily stuck.

On the free plan, it may be waiting for the next day's allowance. On any plan, a campaign to new contacts may be in the early test phase, where engagement on a sample is assessed before the rest is released ^[13]. Large campaigns also take time to deliver.

Do not duplicate a campaign that appears stuck. If it resumes, recipients get it twice, which raises unsubscribes and complaints, the very figures that trigger a suspension.

When it really is Brevo

Sometimes the platform does have an incident. The status page is the place to watch, component by component. Subscribe to its updates so you hear about an incident before your customers do.

During an incident, avoid resending, pause any time-critical automations if you can, and keep a note of which emails were affected so you can follow up afterwards.

Support routes

Support depends on the plan: email support on Free and Starter, priority email on Standard, and phone support from Professional ^[5]. For a suspension right after signup, the help centre directs you to the support team for a manual check ^[13].

In our review sample, support is mentioned in 47 of 100 reviews, 27 of them negatively ^[15]. Most of those negative reviews describe trying to resolve a suspension. Expect a ticket, not a phone call, below Professional.

Symptoms and their usual causes

What you see	Most likely cause	Where to check
Can log in, nothing sends	suspension	Deliverability center
Only 300 people received a campaign	free plan daily limit	today's sending on Free
Password resets not arriving	free plan limit or API keys	daily sending; API and SMTP settings
Cannot add contacts	contact cap on tier	My plan, contact count
Account locked after a card change	failed payment	billing in My plan
Cannot log in to an old free account	deleted for inactivity	your email for a warning
Campaign "sending" for hours	early test phase or daily limit	campaign report

Use the table before contacting support. Most of these are fixed from the account, without a ticket.

A free account's sending day, hour by hour

A free account with 900 contacts schedules a campaign for 9:00 and has a website sending password resets and receipts.

9:00. The campaign starts and reaches 300 contacts. The day's allowance is now used.

11:00. A customer asks for a password reset. The email goes into the retry queue, which holds up to 1,000 more ^[6].

Next day, 0:00. The allowance resets. The account owner must resend the campaign to the next 300 contacts by hand; it does not continue on its own ^[6].

Result. The campaign takes three days to reach everyone, and transactional email competes with it for the same 300 sends. To the website's users, Brevo looks down. It is working exactly as the free plan describes.

Preparing for problems before they happen

Four habits make an apparent outage less damaging.

Subscribe to the status page. You hear about incidents in the components you use ^[18].

Separate transactional and marketing sending. On a paid plan, credits cover both, but keeping a newsletter from competing with receipts is good practice. On Free, it is essential.

Schedule important campaigns with margin. A sale that starts at 9:00 should not depend on an email scheduled for 8:55.

Keep the payment method current. The terms allow suspension without notice when a charge fails ^[14], and a card expiry is the easiest outage to prevent.

Questions to send support

If the cause is not obvious, a precise ticket gets a faster answer. Include the account email, the campaign or API call affected, the time it failed, any warning shown in the Deliverability center, and whether the status page showed an incident. Ask whether the account is suspended and, if so, which threshold was crossed, so you can fix the list rather than guess.

After the problem is fixed

Once sending resumes, check what was missed. List the campaigns and automations that stopped, the transactional emails that failed, and the contacts who should have received them. Resend only what is still relevant, to the people who did not receive it, and avoid sending the same message twice. Then note the cause and the fix, so the next person on your team does not repeat the diagnosis.

## A quick diagnostic

1. Status page green? If not, watch the affected component.
2. Warning in the Deliverability center? Follow the reactivation steps, then clean the list.
3. Free account at 300 sends today? Wait or upgrade.
4. Contact count over your tier's cap? Reduce contacts or check the upgrade charge.
5. Failed payment? Update the card.
6. Cannot log in to an old free account? It may have been deleted for inactivity.
7. Website or app emails failing? Check API keys, SMTP credentials and plugins.

On the evidence of the status page, the first step will rarely be the answer. On the evidence of the reviews, the second step is the one that matters most, because a second suspension is final.