Is Kimi K3 (Moonshot) Down?

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

Last editorial review: 2026-07-22

How to check right now

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Step 2 -- Crowdsourced reports
DownDetector: Kimi K3 (Moonshot)→

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

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Step 4 -- Official status page
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Known issues we've tracked

MODEL LAUNCH -- KIMI K3 (2026-07-16/17): Moonshot shipped **Kimi K3**, billed as the largest open-weight model ever announced -- **2.8T total parameters**, multimodal reasoning, **1M token context**, live immediately on kimi.com, the Kimi app, the Moonshot API, and OpenRouter at **$3/M input, $15/M output** (vs Fable 5's $50/M output). Unveiled at the World AI Conference in Shanghai 7/17 after appearing on platforms 7/16; the stealth Arena model 'Kivine' was K3 in testing, and Arena.AI ranked it the best available model at launch. Vendor claims it performs competitively with Claude Fable 5 and 'substantially outperforms' Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6 Sol -- third-party verification pending; treat vendor benchmark claims accordingly. Market reaction was dubbed a 'second DeepSeek shock': TSMC fell 7%, SoftBank 9%, Nasdaq 100 ~1% on 7/17. CAVEATS: (a) full open weights are NOT on Hugging Face yet -- Moonshot promised them late July (press reports cite 7/27) and the license is unconfirmed (K2 precedent: Modified MIT); (b) API capacity is limited at launch -- OpenRouter flags frequent 429 errors; (c) reasoning effort currently supports only 'max'; (d) active-parameter count is aggregator-reported (~50B), not vendor-published -- treat with caution
2026-07-17•OpenRouter (openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3), Fortune (2026-07-17), Reuters, CNBC, r/LocalLLaMA
MODEL LAUNCH (2026-06-12): **Kimi K2.7-Code** -- Moonshot's code-specialized variant dropped on HuggingFace (moonshotai/Kimi-K2.7-Code, HN front page 333 points). Specs: 1T-param MoE with 32B active (384 experts), 256K context, Modified MIT license, MoonViT 400M vision encoder, built on K2.6, ~30% fewer thinking tokens than K2.6, forces thinking mode on. API via platform.moonshot.ai (OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible endpoints). Notably honest self-published benchmarks show it TRAILING the frontier: Kimi Code Bench v2 62.0 vs GPT-5.5's 69.0 and Opus 4.8's 67.4 -- Moonshot is positioning on open-weights value, not SOTA claims. API pricing circulating in aggregators (~$0.19 cached/$0.95 in/$4.00 out per 1M) -- verify on the vendor pricing page before relying on it
2026-06-12•HuggingFace (huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K2.7-Code), Hacker News, platform.moonshot.ai
API DEPRECATION (2026-05-25, vendor docs verbatim: 'The kimi-k2 series models were officially discontinued on May 25, 2026'): retired model ids -- kimi-k2-0905-preview, kimi-k2-0711-preview, kimi-k2-turbo-preview, kimi-k2-thinking, kimi-k2-thinking-turbo. If your code pins any of these, requests now fail; migrate to kimi-k2.6 (or kimi-k2.5, which remains an active model alongside it). K2.6 detail confirmed on the vendor blog: open weights on HuggingFace (moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6), 256K context (262,144 default), agent swarm scaling to **300 sub-agents / 4,000 coordinated steps** (up from K2.5's 100/1,500)
2026-05-25•Moonshot platform docs (platform.kimi.ai/docs/models), kimi.com/blog/kimi-k2-6, HuggingFace moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6
SUPERSEDED (2026-07-16): the June-era 'K3 never shipped / treat K3 claims as fabrication' guidance no longer holds -- Kimi K3 is real and launched July 16-17, 2026 (see the K3 launch entry above). The May Manifold window did resolve NO (K3 missed May by six weeks), and the skepticism was correct at the time; the launch simply came later than the rumor mill claimed. Retained for history: the K2-series API deprecation (5/25) and K2.6 investment preceded K3 rather than replacing it.
2026-07-16•kimi.com, OpenRouter (openrouter.ai/moonshotai/kimi-k3), Fortune (2026-07-17)
Kimi K2.6 (GA 2026-04-20) supersedes K2.5 -- 1T total / 32B active MoE, 256K context, adds native video input (mp4/mov/avi/webm). Scores 54 on Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.0, ranked #1 open-weights and #4 overall (three points behind Claude Opus 4.7 / Gemini 3.1 Pro / OpenAI flagships at 57). SWE-Bench Pro 58.6%. Modified MIT license unchanged. Moonshot direct API: $0.60 in / $2.50 out per 1M tokens. OpenRouter blended: ~$0.95 in / $4.00 out. If you were on K2.5, the upgrade is non-breaking on the API side -- Moonshot routes the K2.6 model under the same endpoint family
2026-04-20•Moonshot Kimi blog (kimi.com/blog/kimi-k2-6), HuggingFace moonshotai/Kimi-K2.6, Artificial Analysis, OpenRouter, SiliconANGLE
Self-hosting K2.5 / K2.6 at usable speed requires $30K+ in enterprise GPU hardware (8x H200 FP8 or 16x H100 production-grade) -- realistically this is a hosted-API model. Mac Studio M3 Ultra 256 GB unified RAM at Q2 quantization runs the model but at ~3 tok/s
2026-03•Reddit r/LocalLLaMA, llm-stats.com

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

What to use if Kimi K3 (Moonshot) 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 -- Qwen3.8-Max flagship previewed at WAIC (Jul 19 2026: 2.4T sparse-MoE multimodal, closed preview, 'second only to Fable 5'), Qwen 3.7 Max GA (SWE-Bench Pro 60.6%, Terminal-Bench 69.7%, $2.50/$7.50 per 1M), Qwen3.6-27B dense Apache 2.0 (beats the 397B MoE on coding from one consumer GPU)

A

MiniMax M3

8.4

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

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

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 Kimi K3 (Moonshot)

Tier A (8.1/10). Moonshot's 2.8T-parameter Kimi K3 (launched 2026-07-16/17) is the largest open-weight model ever announced -- 1M context, multimodal, $3/$15 per 1M via API, ranked best-available on Arena.AI at launch. Weights promised late July (press cites 7/27); K2.6/K2.7-Code remain the shipped-weights line

Read the full Kimi K3 (Moonshot)review →