ChatGPT Down: OpenAI Chatbot Hit by Major Outage Affecting Users Worldwide
ChatGPT is down for many users on Thursday, September 3, 2026, after OpenAI reported elevated errors affecting its popular artificial intelligence chatbot and Codex services.
The disruption left users unable to reliably access ChatGPT, send prompts, load conversations and use several of the platform’s features. OpenAI acknowledged the incident on its status page and said it was investigating the problem before later applying a mitigation and monitoring recovery.
The outage quickly attracted attention online as thousands of users reported problems with the service. Reports indicated that the disruption was affecting multiple parts of the ChatGPT ecosystem rather than being limited to one isolated feature.
ChatGPT Users Report Widespread Problems
Users experiencing the outage reported a range of problems. Some were unable to open existing conversations, while others encountered errors when attempting to send new prompts.
Other ChatGPT features were also affected, including Search, file uploads, Voice mode, GPTs, image generation, Deep Research and Agent functionality. Codex, OpenAI’s coding-focused service, was also included in the incident.
The problems appeared across different ways of accessing ChatGPT, including web and app users. This made the outage particularly disruptive for people who rely on OpenAI’s tools for work, coding, research, writing and everyday tasks.
Downdetector also recorded a sharp increase in reports as the outage developed, providing another indication that the problem was broader than individual users experiencing isolated connection issues.
OpenAI Confirms ChatGPT Outage
OpenAI’s own status page confirmed that ChatGPT and Codex were experiencing elevated errors.
The company initially said it was investigating the affected services. An update later stated that OpenAI had applied a mitigation and was monitoring recovery. The status remained under monitoring as engineers worked to determine whether all affected services had returned to normal.
OpenAI’s status page showed 15 affected ChatGPT components and four Codex components during the incident. The exact cause had not been publicly established at the time of the latest update.
Users therefore continued to experience different levels of disruption depending on the feature, account and service they were trying to access.
Other AI Chatbots Also Experienced Problems
The ChatGPT outage came during an unusually difficult period for several major AI platforms.
Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok also experienced outages around the same time, while reports later indicated that Google’s Gemini was experiencing problems in several regions.
The simultaneous problems raised questions about whether the disruptions could have a common infrastructure-related cause. However, there was no confirmed evidence that the outages were connected.
Reports also pointed to infrastructure issues as a possible factor, but companies had not established a definitive common cause.
Is ChatGPT Back Online?
OpenAI said it had applied a mitigation and was monitoring recovery, suggesting that the company had moved beyond the initial investigation phase. However, users could continue to experience intermittent problems while services recovered.
OpenAI’s status page remains the best source for checking the live condition of ChatGPT and Codex because individual users can experience different availability depending on their account, model and specific features.
The outage is another reminder of how heavily businesses, developers and individual users now depend on AI services. Even a temporary interruption can affect everything from customer support and software development to research, content creation and workplace productivity.
For users still seeing errors, refreshing the application, checking the service status and waiting for OpenAI’s recovery process to complete may be necessary.
As engineers continue monitoring the systems, the key question is how quickly ChatGPT can return to full reliability for all users following the major September 3 disruption.
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