(SAN FRANCISCO, USA) – A widespread service disruption hit ChatGPT on Friday, affecting users across multiple continents and blocking access to conversations and chat history. The outage was recorded by monitoring service Downdetector and confirmed by OpenAI on its own status page.
OpenAI reported raised error levels across ChatGPT, its application programming interface for developers and its Codex coding assistant. The company said it had taken steps to reduce the impact and was tracking the recovery process. Users from the United States to India and Australia reported being unable to load conversations, access saved chat history or submit new queries. The disruption also affected endpoints on which thousands of external applications depend without being directly visible to end users.
Downdetector data showed that at the peak of the outage, reports from the United States reached approximately 3,000 submissions. Of those, 80 percent related to the ChatGPT service itself, 8 percent to the mobile application and 7 percent to Codex. The concentration of reports pointed to a core platform issue rather than isolated regional problems.
The incident follows a pattern of intermittent service interruptions for OpenAI’s products as user demand continues to grow. ChatGPT remains one of the most widely used artificial intelligence chat platforms globally, with millions of active users relying on it for tasks ranging from coding support to content generation. The application programming interface serves as the backbone for a large ecosystem of third party tools and business integrations, meaning any disruption carries knock on effects beyond OpenAI’s own user base.
OpenAI did not provide a specific cause for the outage in its initial update. The company’s status page indicated that monitoring was ongoing as recovery efforts proceeded. No timeline for full restoration was given at the time of reporting.
The outage generated significant user reaction across social media and technology forums, where users shared error messages and reported difficulties across both free and paid subscription tiers. Business customers using the application programming interface for automated workflows also reported failures in dependent services.
OpenAI has invested heavily in infrastructure to support its growing product suite, though rapid scaling has occasionally led to capacity challenges. The company recently expanded its data centre footprint and continues to add computing resources to meet demand.