Design
Pexels
Pexels is a free stock photo and video platform with millions of high-resolution images contributed by photographers and videographers worldwide.
What is Pexels?
Pexels was founded in 2014 in Berlin with a mission that was genuinely idealistic for its time: build a stock photo library where every image is free to use for any purpose, with no attribution required and no licensing fees, ever. The Pexels License was designed to be simpler and more permissive than Creative Commons, removing the legal friction that made even free stock photo sites difficult to use confidently in commercial work. That simplicity, combined with a curated quality standard that rejected the "clipart aesthetic" of older free stock sites, built a community of dedicated photographers and a loyal user base of designers, bloggers, and developers.
Acquired by Canva in 2019, Pexels now serves as both a standalone platform and an integrated asset source inside Canva's design tools, connecting its library to hundreds of millions of Canva users. The public API is widely used by developers embedding stock photo search into their own applications, CMS platforms, social media tools, and design apps. This means Pexels outages affect not just direct website visitors but a long tail of third-party products that depend on its API for real-time image search and delivery.
Pexels outages typically manifest as the website returning 503 errors or timing out on image search requests, API endpoints returning error responses that break downstream integrations, high-resolution image downloads failing or returning corrupted files, the Canva asset panel failing to return Pexels results, and the iOS or Android app unable to load collections or search results. CDN-level issues may cause individual images to 404 while the search interface appears functional.
Outage.gg tracks Pexels service status through community-submitted reports. If image search is failing or the API is returning errors for your application, check the live status page to determine whether it is a platform-wide disruption and subscribe to be notified when full service is restored.
Common Pexels Problems
Issues users most frequently report when Pexels is having problems.
Login failures
Players are unable to sign in, receiving authentication errors or being stuck on loading screens.
Matchmaking problems
Unable to find or join matches, long queue times, or errors when trying to connect to game servers.
Disconnections mid-session
Getting unexpectedly kicked from active sessions, losing in-game progress or items.
In-game store & purchases
Cannot load the in-game store, complete purchases, or received items are not appearing in inventory.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about Pexels outages and server status.
You can check the live Pexels server status at outage.gg/services/pexels. The page shows real-time community-submitted outage reports, an hourly trend chart, and the current health status.
Pexels can stop working for a number of reasons including scheduled maintenance windows, unexpected server failures, network infrastructure problems, or DDoS attacks. Check the live status page on Outage.gg for the latest community reports to see if others are experiencing the same issue.
Go to outage.gg/services/pexels and click the "Report an Issue" button. Your report is counted immediately and helps confirm whether a problem is widespread. Reports from multiple users trigger a status change visible to everyone watching the page.
Click the "Notify Me" bell button on the Pexels status page at outage.gg/services/pexels. Create a free account and we will send you an email the moment Pexels comes back online — no app download required.
Many services maintain official status pages with planned maintenance notices. Outage.gg aggregates real-time community-reported outages which often surface faster than official channels.
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