ChatGPT Hits Global Outage
OpenAI today confirmed that its flagship AI service, ChatGPT, is experiencing a significant global outage, affecting core functions across web and mobile platforms. The incident, which began at approximately 3:00 PM ET, has left millions of users unable to access chat histories, generate text, or use advanced tools like image generation and the newly launched Codex app.
Data from independent monitoring services, including Downdetector, showed a massive spike in user reports, with over 12,000 complaints logged within the first thirty minutes of the disruption. Affected users are primarily encountering persistent loading screens or a standard error message: “Hmm… something seems to have gone wrong.”
Official Response and Current Status
In a statement published on the official OpenAI status dashboard, the company acknowledged the stability issues
“We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation. Our engineering teams are investigating the root cause and deploying fixes to restore full functionality as quickly as possible.”
As of this release, the outage impacts several key components of the OpenAI ecosystem:
• ChatGPT Conversations: Ongoing and new chats are largely unresponsive.
• Image Generation: DALL-E 3 and related creative tools are flagged as impaired.
• Codex & API Services: Developer tools and the recently released Codex app for Mac are seeing significant latency and error rates.
Context of the Surge
While a technical root cause has yet to be confirmed, the outage follows a week of high-intensity activity for OpenAI. The company recently released the Codex app, which garnered over 200,000 downloads on its first day. Additionally, today’s Apple Xcode update, which introduced agentic coding support for Codex, may have contributed to a surge in shared system demand.
Guidance for Users
OpenAI recommends that users monitor the Official Status Page (for real-time technical updates. The company expects service to stabilize incrementally as mitigation efforts are rolled out globally.
In the interim, enterprise and individual users are encouraged to refrain from repeated prompt attempts, which can place further strain on the recovery process.
About OpenAI: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
