Is GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI) Down?

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

Last editorial review: 2026-04-17

How to check right now

Step 1 -- Load the site
Open z.ai→

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

Step 2 -- Crowdsourced reports
DownDetector: GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI)→

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

Step 3 -- Live social
Search X for “GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI)down” →

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 GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI)'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

GLM-4.6 requires specific tokenizer and chat template -- several community llama.cpp quants initially had broken tool-use until fixes landed
2026-03•Hugging Face discussions, GitHub issues
Refuses discussion of Tiananmen, Taiwan, Xi Jinping -- same PRC content filters as DeepSeek and Qwen
2026-02•Reddit r/LocalLLaMA

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

What to use if GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI) is down

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

A

Qwen (Alibaba)

8.8

Alibaba's open-weights + API family -- Qwen 3.6-Max-Preview (Apr 20 2026 CLOSED-weights #1 on SWE-bench Pro/Terminal-Bench 2.0/SciCode), Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (Apr 16 open-weights coding champion), plus Qwen 3.6-Plus API flagship. Apache 2.0 on most sizes, but the best model is now proprietary

A

MiniMax M2 / M2.5

8.4

MiniMax's open-weights frontier -- first open model to match Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-Bench at 10-20× lower cost

A

Gemma 4 (Google)

8.3

Google DeepMind's open-weights model family -- multimodal, 256K context, runs on edge devices

A

IBM Granite 4.0

8.2

IBM's enterprise-focused open-weight family -- Granite 4.0 hybrid Mamba-2 + transformer architecture (70-80% memory reduction vs pure transformer), 3B to 32B sizes, Apache 2.0. First open model family to secure ISO 42001 certification. Nano 350M runs on CPU with 8-16GB RAM. 3B Vision variant landed 2026-04-01

A

Kimi K2.5 (Moonshot)

8.1

Moonshot's 1T-parameter MoE open-weights flagship -- best open-source agentic coder, rivals Claude Opus 4.5

About GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI)

Tier A (8.0/10). Zhipu AI's open-weights family -- GLM-5.1 (launched 2026-04-07) is 744B MoE / 40B active, topped SWE-Bench Pro at 58.4 (beating GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6), MIT licensed, 200K context. Trained entirely on 100K Huawei Ascend 910B chips -- first frontier model with zero Nvidia in the training stack

Read the full GLM / Z.ai (Zhipu AI)review →