ChatGPT Down? Codex and OpenAI’s APIs Go Down Worldwide Saturday, Marking the Fourth Outage in as Many Days

ChatGPT and its companion services went down worldwide early Saturday morning, leaving users unable to load conversations, send prompts or access saved chat history in what OpenAI later confirmed was its fourth service disruption in as many days.

Outage-tracking service Downdetector said user reports indicating problems with OpenAI began climbing at 5:11 a.m. Eastern time, with the hashtag #OpenaiDown circulating on social media shortly after. More than 3,000 users had flagged the outage on Downdetector by Saturday morning, and “Is ChatGPT down?” began trending on Google search as reports spread.

What went wrong

The outage affected all three of OpenAI’s core services simultaneously: the ChatGPT chatbot itself, the company’s developer-facing API, and Codex, its AI-powered coding assistant. Users encountered a range of symptoms, including sidebar loading animations that never resolved, an inability to send new messages, and error messages citing “too many concurrent requests.” According to reporting from TheNextWeb, users encountered 503 errors carrying the internal label “biscuit_baker_service_me_circuit_open,” a technical signal indicating requests were being blocked before they could reach OpenAI’s servers.

The disruption was global in scope, with reports coming in from users across the United States, Europe, India and Australia, according to Unite.AI, affecting not just the consumer-facing ChatGPT app but also the many outside applications and services that rely quietly on OpenAI’s API infrastructure to function.

OpenAI’s response

OpenAI acknowledged the outage on its official status page shortly after reports began surfacing, stating it was “investigating the issue for the listed services,” naming APIs, ChatGPT and Codex as affected. The company later updated its language, stating it was “experiencing issues” with “elevated error rates” before eventually reporting a mitigation had been applied. “We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” OpenAI said, as the company moved from an “investigating” to a “monitoring” status within roughly an hour of the outage’s onset.

By late Saturday morning, the outage appeared to be resolved. Outage-tracking service StatusGator reported that OpenAI’s status returned to “operational” as of just after noon UTC, noting 554 total user-submitted reports of problems over the preceding 24 hours, with the disruption marked as resolved.

The fourth disruption in four days

Saturday’s outage was notable not just for its scope but for its place in a broader pattern. According to TheNextWeb, the incident marked the fourth service disruption OpenAI had experienced in four consecutive days, a stretch of instability that has drawn increasing attention given how deeply ChatGPT and OpenAI’s underlying infrastructure have become embedded in both consumer routines and third-party business applications.

A history of recurring outages

Saturday’s disruption continues a pattern that has affected OpenAI’s services periodically since ChatGPT’s public launch. The company experienced a roughly four-hour outage on June 4, 2025, followed less than two weeks later by a separate incident on June 17, 2025, that knocked ChatGPT offline for about two and a half hours, with OpenAI attributing that disruption to “an elevated error rate” between 11:20 a.m. and 1:55 p.m. Pacific time. An earlier outage on Jan. 23, 2025, affected users across the U.S., U.K. and beyond for several hours before OpenAI issued a fix. A more severe incident on June 10, 2025, lasted more than 10 hours and also affected OpenAI’s video generation tool, Sora, alongside ChatGPT itself.

Why these outages matter beyond individual users

Because ChatGPT and OpenAI’s API have become foundational infrastructure for a wide range of third-party products, ranging from customer service tools to coding assistants built on top of Codex, disruptions to OpenAI’s core services can ripple outward well beyond individuals simply trying to chat with the AI model directly. Businesses that have built products on top of OpenAI’s API face their own downstream outages whenever the underlying service experiences elevated error rates, a dynamic that has become an increasingly significant point of scrutiny as more companies embed OpenAI’s technology directly into their own offerings.

What affected users experienced

During Saturday’s outage, users described being stuck in persistent loading loops when attempting to open the ChatGPT sidebar or access prior conversation history, according to BleepingComputer. Attempts to send new messages returned errors citing an excessive volume of concurrent requests, effectively locking users out of active conversations even when the interface itself appeared to load normally.

How OpenAI communicates during outages

OpenAI maintains a public status page that the company updates during service disruptions, though as with several past incidents, the company’s public acknowledgment lagged behind the volume of user reports appearing on independent tracking platforms like Downdetector. That pattern, users noticing and reporting problems before OpenAI’s own status page reflects an issue, has remained consistent across the company’s outage history, from January 2025 through Saturday’s incident.

With OpenAI reporting the outage as resolved by late Saturday morning, the company has not disclosed a specific root cause for the disruption or detailed what changes, if any, it plans to make following its fourth outage in four consecutive days. Given the frequency of the recent disruptions, users and businesses relying on OpenAI’s services may reasonably expect continued scrutiny of the company’s infrastructure reliability in the days ahead, particularly as ChatGPT, Codex and OpenAI’s API continue to see growing adoption across both individual and enterprise use cases. For now, service has been restored, but the string of back-to-back incidents this week leaves open the question of whether Saturday’s fix will hold or whether additional disruptions may follow.