ChatGPT Down? Global Outage Leaves Millions Without AI Assistant — Live Updates

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is experiencing a widespread outage this morning, leaving millions of users staring at blank screens, “Something went wrong” banners, or endless loading wheels. The disruption began around 09:30 UTC, with reports spiking on Downdetector and social media within minutes. According to the official OpenAI Status page, engineers are “investigating degraded performance” affecting both the web and mobile interfaces, as well as the API that powers third-party apps. At the time of writing, the incident has been ongoing for more than 14 hours, and no estimated time to full recovery has been posted. What users are seeing • Blank chat windows that never render responses • HTTP 429 “Too Many Requests” and 502 “Bad Gateway” errors • Failure to log in or persistent “Verify you are human” loops Global reach Outage heat maps show concentration points in the United States, United Kingdom, India, and parts of Europe, but user reports are incoming from every continent, confirming a worldwide disruption. Why it matters • Businesses relying on the API for customer support chatbots are seeing service interruptions. • Students working on end-of-term projects are unable to generate code or draft essays. • Developers integrating GPT-4o in real-time apps are facing cascading errors. Interim work-arounds 1. Monitor status.openai.com for live updates before retrying. 2. Clear browser cache and cookies to flush any corrupted session data, then refresh. 3. Switch to a different browser or the iOS/Android app; some users report partial success. 4. If you rely on the API, implement exponential back-off and fail-over to cached responses until rate limits normalize. How to stay informed • Follow @OpenAI and @OpenAIStatus on X (Twitter) for minute-by-minute incident notes. • Track Downdetector spikes to gauge when traffic stabilizes. • Tech outlets such as TechRadar and ZDNET are providing rolling coverage and will publish the “all-clear” once confirmed. Looking ahead OpenAI outages are rare but increasing in frequency as the user base explodes past 200 million monthly actives. Today’s incident underscores the need for better redundancy and clearer status communication. Once service is restored, expect a post-mortem from OpenAI detailing root cause and mitigation steps. In the meantime, patience and periodic refreshes are the only viable remedies as the AI community waits for ChatGPT to come back online.