Scratch can be “down” for a few different reasons, and it isn’t always a full platform outage.

The most common reasons

  • Server overload or maintenance – When many users are online or the Scratch Team is doing backend work, the site can become slow, log you out, or show error pages.
  • Partial outages – Sometimes only certain features break (e.g., projects not saving, comments not loading) while the homepage still appears.
  • Rate‑limiting / too many requests – If your browser sends a lot of requests very quickly, Scratch can temporarily block you because it looks like an attack, which makes it seem like “Scratch is down” just for you.
  • Local connection issues – In some cases, users on forums discover that the issue is their own internet, browser, or cache, and Scratch starts working again after some troubleshooting.

On community forums, you’ll often see short threads like “Is Scratch down?” where multiple people confirm slow or broken behavior for a few hours, then later reply that it’s working again.

How to check if Scratch is really down

  • Visit a status/checker page for scratch.mit.edu to see if others are reporting problems.
  • Try opening the Scratch homepage in a new tab or a different browser profile to see if you’re logged out or getting an error screen.
  • If a checker shows the site as “up,” but you still can’t reach it, refresh fully, clear cache/cookies, or try another network, as recommended on uptime tools.

Quick mini‑story example

Imagine it’s a school morning and you’re rushing to finish a Scratch project. You open the editor, and it won’t save, then suddenly you’re logged out. You jump onto a Scratch forum or Reddit and see a flurry of posts: “Servers slow or down?” and “It’s been like this for hours.” A bit later, someone replies, “It works again now,” which usually means the Scratch Team fixed a temporary server issue or the traffic spike passed.

What you can do right now

  1. Check a Scratch status/outage page and see if there’s a known issue.
  1. If it says the site is up, try: full refresh, different browser or device, and clearing cache/DNS as suggested by outage‑check sites.
  1. If only you seem affected, avoid rapidly reloading or opening many Scratch tabs, since that can trigger rate‑limits.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.