Check if it's actually the widget or your quota
The most common cause isn't an outage at all — it's hitting your plan's monthly request cap. Check your usage dashboard first; if you're at the limit, the widget going quiet is expected behavior, not a bug, and the fix is either upgrading your plan or waiting for the next billing period.
This is worth checking first specifically because it's by far the most common cause, and it's easy to rule out quickly rather than jumping to more complicated explanations.
Check if the snippet is still present
A site redesign, theme change, or plugin update can accidentally remove a custom script without anyone noticing immediately — especially if someone else on your team made the change and didn't know the chatbot tag needed to be preserved. Confirm the tag is still in your site's code, viewable through your browser's page source, before assuming the provider itself is down.
This is a particularly common cause after a site migration or a theme switch, since custom code snippets are exactly the kind of thing that gets lost in a platform change unless someone specifically checks for it.
Check your provider's status page
A real outage on the vendor's side should be visible on their status page or through their support channel — if there's nothing reported there, the issue is more likely local to your site or account rather than a widespread problem affecting every customer. If the widget itself never appears, start with Widget not showing up on my site.
It's worth knowing where to find this before you need it, rather than searching for it for the first time in the middle of an actual issue.
Have a fallback for extended downtime
Keep a visible contact email or phone number on your site independent of the chatbot, so visitors always have a way to reach you even if the widget is temporarily unavailable for any reason. This is good practice regardless of how reliable your chatbot provider is — no single tool should be the only way for a visitor to reach you.