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ChatGPT has been failing across half the world all morning. OpenAI's status page insists everything is fine

The outage started at 4:47 AM Eastern, with logins failing, chat histories vanishing and API requests bouncing. OpenAI briefly acknowledged the incident on its status page, which went back to green while thousands of users were still locked out

VM
Written and edited by:Víctor Muñoz Olleta
The Pioneer Building in San Francisco, OpenAI's longtime home
Image: HaeB · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Stalled prompts, empty sidebars and one exact timestamp: 4:47 AM Eastern

You open ChatGPT, type your question and the cursor just spins. You reload and it gets worse: the sidebar comes back with none of your conversations in it. You try the phone and the app greets you with an Application Error. It is not you: since 4:47 AM Eastern this morning, outage reports have surged on Downdetector, coming in from the United States, Germany, the UK, India, Japan and Australia. A global outage by any definition, landing right in the middle of the working day for half of Europe.

The symptoms repeat from user to user: prompts stuck in endless loading loops, chat histories vanishing from the sidebar, rejected logins, an Error in message stream cutting answers off halfway and voice mode going silent. The outage does not discriminate either: free, Plus and Enterprise accounts are affected, on web and mobile alike.

There is more, and it stings hardest for anyone who built a business on top: the API is also returning errors and rejected requests, so the damage does not stop at the chat window. Third-party assistants and apps running on OpenAI's models have spent the morning just as broken. We have lived it first-hand in this newsroom: we have been trying to work with ChatGPT since early morning and it answers one time in four, on a good streak.

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OpenAI's status page went back to green before its users did

OpenAI did briefly acknowledge the incident on its official dashboard with a terse "we are investigating the issue for the listed services", as reported by BleepingComputer. But by mid-morning the board pulled its usual trick: status.openai.com was back to showing "all systems operational" while user reports kept piling up. It is the waiter swearing the kitchen is running smoothly while you watch the smoke come out the door.

The cause? OpenAI has not detailed one. Business Upturn points at a failure in the authentication service, and it would fit: it would explain the rejected logins, the expired sessions and those histories that look deleted without being deleted. Until there is official confirmation it stays a hypothesis with a byline — which is still more than the company itself has offered.

The timing, though, is straight out of a script. The outage arrives one day after the launch of Claude Opus 5, the rival Anthropic has been pushing hard this very week, and in the same month that already gave us the PlayStation Network outage. July 2026 is building itself quite the trophy shelf of broken servers.

Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, at a TechCrunch event
Image: TechCrunch · CC BY 2.0
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Is ChatGPT down for you? How to check if the outage is still live

Two stops, thirty seconds: OpenAI's official dashboard at status.openai.com and ChatGPT's page on Downdetector, which mirrors what other users are reporting in real time. If the dashboard shows green but the reports keep stacking up by the hundreds, believe the reports. Today is the perfect example: the status page was late to its own outage.

While it lasts, keep it boring. Do not delete the app and do not touch your account: your history is not gone, it comes back when the service does. And if work will not wait, the alternatives have had a quiet morning: Gemini, Claude and Copilot were all running normally at the time of writing.

My bet, based on how these outages usually play out: choppy service for a few hours, region-by-region recovery and not another word from OpenAI once everything settles. I would love to be wrong about that second part. We will update this article if an official explanation lands or if the outage stretches into the evening.

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