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‘Couldn’t reach Driftstack’ / Offline pill / server not answering

You might be here because: “couldn’t reach driftstack” · “the pill says offline” · “no green thing in the corner” · “server busy” · “the server is not answering right now” · “connection check timed out” · “app won’t connect” · “couldn’t load account info” · “app says offline” · “is driftstack down”

Short answer

The pill in the app shows the last connection check: green Connected, amber Connecting… or Server busy, red Offline. Hover it to read the reason and the server address it’s checking. “Couldn’t reach Driftstack. Check your connection and try again.” means the app got no answer at all — usually your network, a firewall or VPN, or a wrong server address.

Check first

  • Is this computer online? Open any website.
  • Cloud: check the status page. Self-hosted: check the server address in Settings and that the server is running.
  • Amber “Server busy” or “not answering right now” is not an outage on your side: the app retries every 3 seconds by itself.

Likely causes and fixes

  1. Red Offline, “Couldn’t reach Driftstack.” No response. Check connection, VPN, firewall, and the server address in Settings; each check waits 8 seconds before giving up.
  2. “Connection check timed out. Check your connection and try again.” Slow or blocked network.
  3. Amber “Server busy” / “The server is not answering right now. Retrying automatically.” The server answered but is restarting or overloaded; wait, the pill turns green on its own.
  4. “The server is receiving too many requests. Try again shortly.” A rate limit; wait a minute.
  5. “The service is temporarily unavailable. Try again shortly.” Server-side error; check the status page.
  6. “Your sign-in or API key was not accepted. Check Settings and try again.” Reachable, but your credential is refused — see ‘This API key wasn’t accepted’.
  7. Account card: “Couldn’t load account info. Check the server URL, then retry.” or “The request took too long.” Same network/URL causes as above.

If it still fails

Press Talk to a person in this chat (or open Help) and include the pill’s tooltip text, the server address shown, cloud or self-hosted, and the time. Include whether other devices on the same network can reach the dashboard. The assistant can’t change anything server-side; a lasting outage is announced on the status page.