Stack Overflow logged just 969 new questions in September 2026

On 2026-10-29, a post on the Chinese software site Aoshuojv reported that, based on a query of Stack Overflow's own public data, the platform's monthly question volume had fallen from a peak of 200,000 to fewer than 969, a drop of more than 99.5%. The post said this reflected a clear shift in where developers go when they need help.

The next day, 2026-10-30, Bluedot posted a report putting the figure at under 1,000 per month, down from 200,000 twelve years earlier, and said traffic had fallen in step. That piece went further than the others, describing Stack Overflow as essentially destroyed by AI: developers now tell AI tools what to do instead of asking questions on the site or searching for answers manually. cnBeta published a similar story roughly an hour later, repeating the sub-1,000 figure and the same explanation: after AI coding tools arrived, visits declined, more developers turned to AI for solutions, active users kept falling, and question volume collapsed.

At 14:54 the same day, IT Home added a different kind of detail: verification rather than commentary. It said a Hacker News thread that week had claimed Stack Overflow now gets fewer than 1,000 new questions a month. Rather than trusting the chart circulating there, developer frank chu queried the Stack Exchange API himself, calling the /questions endpoint, filtering by month using start and end dates, setting the page size to 1, and reading the total field to count questions created in that period. According to IT Home, the numbers came back at 10,192 for August 2026, 969 for September 2026, 977 for October 2026 through October 29, 52,632 for October 2025, 231,622 for October 2024, and 141,749 for October 2020. Because October 2026 was still a partial month, September was the complete month used to test the claim.

The sources differ on why the decline happened. The first report cited Stack Overflow's own public data query. Bluedot and cnBeta attributed it to AI tools. IT Home focused on how frank chu verified the figures and did not itself draw a causal conclusion. As of the latest report, the story stands at the point where the 969-question figure for September has been independently checked against the API and the Hacker News claim confirmed; no response from Stack Overflow on the data or on the attribution has been reported.