Is Descript Down?

Quickest ways to check the current status of descript.com plus recent known issues and working alternatives if it's out.

Last editorial review: 2026-06-10

How to check right now

Step 1 -- Load the site
Open descript.com→

The simplest check. If it loads and you can log in, the tool is up for you.

Step 2 -- Crowdsourced reports
DownDetector: Descript→

User-reported outages aggregated across regions. Good signal for partial or regional outages.

Step 3 -- Live social
Search X for “Descriptdown” →

Live tweets from other users. Fastest signal for a fresh outage -- often beats status pages by 10-20 minutes.

Step 4 -- Official status page
Find Descript's status page →

Most vendors publish a status page at status.[domain] or on Statuspage.io. Google-search to find the current URL.

Known issues we've tracked

API OPEN BETA + UNDERLORD UPGRADE (2026-05-14, vendor changelog): the **Descript API launched in open beta** -- direct file uploads, publish triggers from external workflows, programmatic project search, and live progress surfaced in Claude and ChatGPT via **MCP connection**. Underlord (the AI editor) gained **context pinning** (@-button attaches files, scenes, timestamps, or individual layers to chat), reasoning-model integration for complex tasks, persistent chat history, and automatic second-pass edit verification. Same entry: ElevenLabs Scribe v2 is now the default transcription engine, GPT Image 2 for image gen, and new media formats (MKV, AVIF, Opus, WebM, multi-channel surround). Earlier (3/17): rebuilt Color adjustment tools with filter presets and a white-balance eyedropper
2026-05-14•Descript changelog (descript.canny.io/changelog -- 2026-05-14 entry)
Projects over 2 hours sometimes experience timeline sync issues where transcript and media drift apart
2026-03•Descript Community Forum
Overdub voice clone occasionally mispronounces common words after recent updates
2026-02•Reddit r/descript

Issues here are sourced from our editorial sweeps, not real-time telemetry. Newer issues may exist.

What to use if Descript is down

Top AIToolTier-ranked alternatives in the same category, ordered by our overall score.

A

GPT-Live (ChatGPT Voice)

8.6

OpenAI's full-duplex voice models (launched 2026-07-08) now powering ChatGPT Voice -- listens and speaks at the same time, backchannels naturally, and delegates hard questions to GPT-5.5 in the background while keeping the conversation going. GPT-Live-1 for paid tiers, GPT-Live-1 mini for Free

A

ElevenLabs

8.5

Best-in-class AI voice generation -- now includes 11.ai (MCP-based voice assistant), Eleven v3 expressive speech, and IBM watsonx partnership. $500M raise at $11B valuation (Feb 2026)

A

Grok Speech (STT + TTS APIs)

8.1

xAI's standalone voice APIs -- launched 2026-04-17. Built on the stack that powers Grok Voice, Tesla vehicles, and Starlink customer support. $0.10/hr STT batch, $4.20 per 1M characters TTS, 25+ languages. Now 26 flagship TTS voices (21 new added 2026-07-06), custom voice cloning from ~1 min of audio, and a no-code Grok Voice Agent Builder

A

Cohere Transcribe

8.0

Cohere's first audio model -- launched 2026-03-26 under Apache 2.0, 2B parameters, #1 on Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard (5.42 avg WER), 14 enterprise-critical languages. Free API with rate limits; Model Vault for production

B

Microsoft MAI-Voice-2

7.3

Microsoft's in-house expressive TTS model -- MAI-Voice-2 launched 2026-06-02 at Build: 15 languages (up from English-only), granular emotion-tag control, zero-shot voice cloning from a 5-60s clip, and preferred over MAI-Voice-1 72% of the time. In speaker-similarity tests its speech is 'indistinguishable' from real recordings. On Azure Foundry + integrated into VS Code and Dynamics 365 Contact Center; lower-cost MAI-Voice-2-Flash coming. Original MAI-Voice-1 shipped 2026-04-02

About Descript

Tier A (8.5/10). Edit audio and video by editing text -- the 'Google Docs of media editing' actually lives up to the hype

Read the full Descriptreview →