Perplexity not working? 10 fixes, most on your end

How do you fix Perplexity when it is not working?

Perplexity lists its own fixes in two help center articles, Need support? and Cloudflare & VPNs. We read both on 12 October 2026. Here is every step, in the order that saves your work first.

1. Copy your question and any answer that arrived. Then nothing below depends on the page keeping them.
2. Check status.perplexity.com. Read the Website and App rows, not just the banner. The old address, status.perplexity.ai, now redirects there.
3. Hard refresh. Perplexity gives the keys: Ctrl+F5 on Windows, Command+Shift+R on a Mac.
4. Turn off your VPN or proxy. "Disconnect VPN if using one" is on Perplexity's support page, and a VPN also sets off Cloudflare's checks.
5. Open Perplexity in a private window or another browser. That rules out your extensions in one move.
6. Clear cookies and site data for perplexity.ai only, then sign in again. Perplexity suggests it when a loading screen keeps coming back.
7. Switch networks. Try your phone on mobile data. If it works there, your wifi or office network is the cause.
8. Update the app, or try the website. "Check for app updates on mobile devices" is Perplexity's own step for phones.
9. Check the account and the limits. Confirm you're signed in with the email that pays. A free account gets 3 Pro Searches a day, and a spent pool can look like a broken search; Perplexity Pro limits has the weekly numbers.
10. Wait, then contact support. Perplexity says these problems "usually resolve within 30 minutes to a few hours". If yours doesn't, go to Help, then Contact Support.

That's why step 2 rarely ends the hunt. We opened every incident on Perplexity's status page on 12 October 2026. Eight ran from 23 July on, besides a maintenance notice and one entry titled "test incident". Six hit Computer, Perplexity's agent product, and never touched the search box. Two touched search. Together they lasted 101 minutes. So a search that fails on a green status page is almost always a fault on your side, or one Perplexity hasn't posted yet.

Is Perplexity down right now, or is it just you?

It's Perplexity when status.perplexity.com shows an open incident on the Website or App row. It's you when both rows are green and Perplexity works on your phone over mobile data. On 12 October 2026 the page gave Website 100 percent uptime for July to October, App 99.95 percent, Computer 99.84 percent and the API 100 percent. Here is every incident behind those numbers.

Read the component, not the title. Both incidents that touched search had "API" in the title, and the API row stayed at 100 percent through both. On 9 October Perplexity fixed its own post 32 minutes in: "Correction to our previous updates: we do not believe the API was affected by this incident and it remains operational." The 13 August one was marked on the App, as a full outage. Perplexity's note on the fix says it "identified the problematic deploy and rolled back the service".

The uptime figures count outages, not slowdowns. App at 99.95 percent is about 65 minutes in 90 days, which matches the 64 minute outage on 13 August almost to the minute. The 9 October slowdown was labeled degraded performance, and it left Website at 100 percent. A 100 percent row means Perplexity never went fully down. It doesn't mean nobody had a slow or failed search.

What does "Something went wrong" mean on Perplexity?

"Something went wrong" is Perplexity's catch-all failure banner. It names no cause, so the message alone can't tell you whether to wait or fix your side. Google's autocomplete shows people typing three versions of it as of October 2026: "something went wrong please try again", "try again later" and "sorry something went wrong". In May 2026 a Pro user on Perplexity's community forum described a connector call that hung for about two minutes. Then it collapsed, in the user's words, to a red banner: "Sorry, something went wrong". The table gives each message we could trace to a source, as of October 2026.

The "Internal Error" row comes from a Vivaldi forum thread with 11 posts, opened in July 2025. The page came up for a second, then flipped to the error. The poster first quoted Perplexity.ai blaming Vivaldi's "differences from standard chromium browsers". That was wrong. In November 2025 the poster rebuilt a clean Vivaldi profile, and it worked until one extension went back in: a fingerprint obfuscator, which Perplexity's checks sometimes rejected. So test in a private window with extensions off before you blame your browser.

Why does Perplexity keep loading or show a Cloudflare check?

A Perplexity page stuck on a loading screen is usually Cloudflare checking you, and a VPN makes that check more likely. Perplexity says so plainly: "Using VPNs increases the likelihood of encountering Cloudflare checks." Its Cloudflare & VPNs page adds that Cloudflare "screens anonymous users more frequently", so signing in helps. Under "Keep your browser updated", it also warns that some browsers "may not send enough data to verify that you are a legitimate user".

On an iPhone, iPad or Mac, iCloud Private Relay hides your IP address much as a VPN does. Apple's Private Relay page says that without it "some websites may require extra steps to sign in or access content". Test once with Private Relay off. If Perplexity loads, that's your cause. Office and school networks do the same with proxies and DNS filters, and step 7, mobile data, is the quickest way to prove it.

Why is Perplexity not working on WhatsApp?

Perplexity stopped answering on WhatsApp because Meta changed the rules, not because of a bug. WhatsApp's business terms say "AI Providers" are "strictly prohibited from accessing or using the WhatsApp Business Platform", and the ban took effect on 15 January 2026. Meta's AI Providers page, updated 1 September 2026, names Brazil as the one country where it still has to allow them. TechCrunch reported that OpenAI, Perplexity and Microsoft had announced their WhatsApp bots would stop working. Clearing the chat won't bring it back. Use the Perplexity app or perplexity.ai instead.

What if Perplexity keeps failing and you need the answer now?

Contact Perplexity support once the status page is green and steps 3 to 9 have failed. Perplexity's support page asks for three things: your platform (Mac, Windows, iPhone or Android), your browser or app version, and a shared link to the thread that failed. Send it through Help, then Contact Support, in your account settings. Pro subscribers can also ask in Perplexity's Discord.

Whizi, which publishes this page, carries Perplexity's Sonar Pro on its $29.99 Pro plan, beside Claude, GPT and Gemini. Web search is on by default in every new chat (how web search works in Whizi), so another model can answer with sources while perplexity.ai is the problem. Where it loses: Sonar Pro costs 20 of Pro's 2,500 monthly credits an answer, which is 125 answers a month. That's far fewer searches than a Perplexity Pro subscription gives, and there's no Comet browser and no Computer agent.