ChatGPT Faces Global Outage as Thousands Report Errors, OpenAI Works on Fix

OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, experienced widespread disruptions on Wednesday, leaving users across the world unable to access conversations or generate responses. Thousands reported that both new and existing chats failed to load, displaying an error message that read, “Hmm…something seems to have gone wrong.”

As the issue persisted, users quickly flocked to outage-tracking platform Downdetector to confirm whether the glitch was isolated or global. Reports surged within minutes, suggesting a broad service interruption affecting multiple regions at once. Frustrated users also turned to social media to share updates, vent their concerns, and, in typical internet fashion, post memes about life without their trusted AI assistant.

OpenAI acknowledged the problem through its official status page, confirming technical difficulties across its services. “We’re currently experiencing issues," OpenAI said on its official status page.

The company provided further clarification shortly after, stating, “We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation."

Later, OpenAI reassured users that corrective steps were underway. “We have identified the issue, applied the necessary mitigations and are monitoring the recovery," the company added.

According to the company, the outage disrupted nearly all core features of ChatGPT, including conversations, search, image generation, Codex, Atlas, and other connected tools. For many users who rely on the chatbot for work, research, and daily tasks, the downtime proved particularly inconvenient.

The timing of the disruption also drew attention, coming just a day after OpenAI rolled out its new Codex app for Mac. The launch had generated significant enthusiasm, with CEO Sam Altman sharing that the app crossed 200,000 downloads on its first day. Around the same time, Apple introduced an Xcode update supporting agentic coding features compatible with Codex and Claude, further boosting interest in AI-powered tools.

As word spread, searches for “ChatGPT down” spiked sharply on X, formerly Twitter. Users joked about suddenly having to depend on their own thinking skills or scrambling to verify whether others were facing the same problem.

“As soon as anything except Twitter goes down, the only correct course of action is search ‘ChatGPT down’ / ‘Instagram down’ on Twitter to make sure you’re not the only one right?" wrote X user Marc Johnson.

Another user captured the mood perfectly: “How fast I came to X Twitter to see if ChatGPT was down #chatgpt," another user posted.

While OpenAI continues to monitor the recovery, the incident highlights just how deeply integrated AI tools like ChatGPT have become in everyday life — and how noticeable their absence can be.