Openrouter Outages On February 17 And 19 2026

Some authentication failures during OpenRouter's February 17 and 19, 2026 outages came from its infrastructure, even when customers' API credentials were correct. According to the incident report, a cache lost its database connections. When it recovered without its saved entries, incoming requests overwhelmed the database with fresh credential lookups. The resulting timeouts incorrectly appeared as 401 authentication errors.

OpenRouter says it deployed controls to repopulate the cache without flooding the database. It also changed failed infrastructure-dependent authorization lookups to return 503 service-unavailable errors, helping customers distinguish a service failure from a credential problem. These are listed among the report's completed remediations.