Is IBM Granite 4.0 Down?

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

Last editorial review: 2026-04-17

How to check right now

Known issues we've tracked

Granite 4.0 3B Vision released 2026-04-01 -- community tool support (llama.cpp vision tower, Ollama vision variant) is still catching up in the first 2-3 weeks post-launch. Watsonx.ai has first-class vision support out of the box
2026-04•IBM announcement, Hugging Face discussions
Granite Nano 350M is a capability floor, not a ceiling -- it handles simple classification and short extraction well but struggles on multi-step reasoning. Use the 3B or larger for anything agentic
2025-12•IBM model cards, VentureBeat coverage

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

What to use if IBM Granite 4.0 is down

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

A

Qwen (Alibaba)

8.8

**Qwen-Image-2.1 went open-weight (weights 2026-09-14, blog 2026-09-20)** -- a unified text-to-image and editing model with a 7B visual-generation component, native transparent (RGBA) output, up to 10 reference images and mask-guided local edits -- but under a **research-only licence, not Apache**: commercial use needs a separate licence from Alibaba. Alibaba's open-weights + API family, and August 2026 was its biggest open-release month yet: **Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B -- the Max-class flagship -- went open-weight on 2026-08-08** (custom Qwen3.8-Max licence), **Qwen3.8-27B** dense landed Apache 2.0 (8/05), and **Qwen3.8-Flash-Next** (8/24 weights, 8/26 blog) previews the Qwen4 architecture: 125B main + 51B n-gram embeddings with only 6B active, served as Qwen3.8-Flash at $0.15/$0.47 per 1M. Qwen 3.7 Max remains the GA API flagship ($2.50/$7.50)

A

MiniMax M3

8.4

**MiniMax-H3's weights are public on Hugging Face (repo 2026-07-28, updated 2026-08-13) under a community licence whose open-weight grant is limited to the US, EU, UK and South Korea**, and **MiniMax Music 3 (2026-08-07)** ships open weights for five-minute full-song generation with a prominent-attribution commercial clause. MiniMax's coding/agent flagship -- M3 (June 1 2026): 1M-token context, MSA sparse attention (>15x decoding speedup at long context), SWE-Bench Pro 59.0%, Terminal-Bench 66.0%. OPEN WEIGHTS LIVE on HuggingFace since June 12 (~428B total / ~23B active, native multimodal, minimax-community license)

A

Gemma 4 (Google)

8.3

Google DeepMind's open-weights model family -- multimodal, 256K context, runs on edge devices **EmbeddingGemma 2 (announced 2026-10-06; weights on Hugging Face since 9/14) adds a 740M-parameter Apache 2.0 embedding model built on Gemma 4 that maps text, code, images, video and audio into one 768-dimensional space, with an 8K context, Matryoshka truncation down to 128 dimensions and about 191 MB of RAM for text-only use on a Pixel 11 Pro.**

A

Kimi K3 (Moonshot)

8.1

Moonshot's 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 (launched 2026-07-16/17) is the largest open-weight model ever released -- 1M context, multimodal, $3/$15 per 1M via API, ranked best-available on Arena.AI at launch. WEIGHTS SHIPPED ~2026-07-26/27 on Hugging Face (2.8T total / 104B activated, safetensors) under a custom Kimi K3 License, not the Modified MIT of the K2 line

A

gpt-oss (OpenAI)

8.1

OpenAI's FIRST open-weight models -- gpt-oss-120b (single 80GB GPU, near parity with o4-mini on reasoning) and gpt-oss-20b (runs on 16GB edge devices). Apache 2.0. Launched 2025-08-05. gpt-oss-safeguard ships in 2026 as the safety-tuned variant

About IBM Granite 4.0

Tier A (8.2/10). 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