Stack Overflow Received 969 Questions in September — Its First Sub-1,000 Month
Stack Overflow received 969 questions in September 2026. A developer verified the figure directly via the Stack Exchange public API, calling the /questions endpoint with monthly fromdate/todate windows and reading the total field — no scraping, no dashboard screenshot.
September is a complete month. There is no partial-month asterisk. The site, which defined how a generation of developers learned to program, has crossed below 1,000 new questions per month for the first time since it launched in 2008.
The numbers
| Month | Questions |
|---|---|
| October 2020 | 141,749 |
| October 2024 | 23,162 |
| October 2025 | 5,263 |
| August 2026 | 1,019 |
| September 2026 | 969 |
Year-over-year declines:
- September 2026 vs October 2025: -81.6%
- September 2026 vs October 2024: -95.8%
- September 2026 vs October 2020: -99.3%
October 2026 is tracking at 977 through October 29, so it will likely finish just above the line — but the direction is not in doubt.
What this does and doesn’t mean
The collapse in question volume does not prove AI caused all of it. HN commenters note that Stack Overflow’s decline began before ChatGPT launched in November 2022 — by then question volume had already fallen to roughly 109,000 per month from a June 2020 local peak near 181,000. The slide predates AI.
What AI did, by the evidence in the slope, was finish the job. Stack Overflow’s own 2026 Developer Survey data puts numbers on it: 64% of respondents say they visit the site less for simple questions; 29% say they ask fewer questions; 27% contribute less. Only 1.2% contribute more.
A smaller segment — 16% — now visits specifically for verification, checking AI-generated answers against authoritative sources. This represents an emerging second use case: Stack Overflow as a citation archive rather than a question queue.
The archive problem
Stack Overflow’s value was always dual: it answered the question you were asking, and it answered the question the next person would ask, discovered through search. At under 1,000 new questions a month, the second function is degrading. The corpus is enormous and still useful, but its intake for fast-moving topics has effectively stopped.
The site built over 58 million questions over 18 years. In the past year, it added roughly 15,000. At September’s rate, it will add fewer than 12,000 this year — less than one percent of what it added in 2013.