Azure Cosmos DB is the globally distributed NoSQL database behind low-latency, always-on workloads - retail carts, IoT telemetry, session state. Its multi-region replication makes full outages rare; incidents usually appear as elevated latency or rate-limiting in one region, or as write-region failover events for accounts without multi-region writes.
Elevated request latency or 503s in one region while other replicas stay healthy
Request rate-limiting (429s) during regional capacity or partition events
Write-region unavailability forcing manual or automatic failover for single-write-region accounts
Indexing or query-engine degradation making reads slow rather than failed
Azure Cosmos DB questions
Is Cosmos DB down right now?+
Check the live status above. If your account is multi-region, verify whether errors are confined to one region - the SDK’s preferred-region list may just need a healthy replica ahead of the impaired one.
What SLA does Cosmos DB carry?+
Cosmos DB’s SLAs are unusually strong: 99.999% availability for multi-region accounts with multi-region writes, and 99.99% for single-region accounts - covering throughput, consistency, and latency as well as availability. Credits are claimed through Azure support.
Get alerted when Azure Cosmos DB breaks
Instant email the moment we detect an incident - affected services and regions included.
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