San Francisco, Feb 4, 2026, 07:18 (PST)
- More than 13,000 U.S. users reported problems at the peak, Downdetector data showed
- OpenAI said it identified the issue, applied mitigations and monitored recovery
- OpenAI’s status page logged additional ChatGPT-related incidents into Wednesday
ChatGPT returned to service after a brief outage on Tuesday that drew thousands of complaints from U.S. users, outage tracker Downdetector showed. OpenAI said it had identified the problem and rolled out mitigations. Reuters
The disruption matters because ChatGPT has become a daily tool for workers, students and developers, and even short breaks can stall customer support, coding and routine writing tasks.
It also comes as reliability becomes a selling point in a crowded AI market, with chatbots increasingly treated less like “apps” and more like utilities.
OpenAI’s status page logged a cluster of incidents affecting ChatGPT and its developer services over the past day, alongside updates saying impacted systems had recovered. Openai
At the peak of Tuesday’s disruption, more than 13,000 users reported problems before the count fell to 309 as of 4:33 p.m. ET, Downdetector data showed. Downdetector’s figures are based on user-submitted reports and other signals, and may not reflect the actual number of affected users.
“We have identified the issue, applied the necessary mitigations and are monitoring the recovery,” OpenAI said in a status update. Openai
The company’s log also flagged “elevated error rates” for fine-tuning jobs on Tuesday. Fine-tuning is the process of customizing an AI model by training it further on a customer’s own data so it better fits a specific task. Openai
Early Wednesday, OpenAI said some users may have had trouble loading or starting conversations in ChatGPT, before it marked the issue resolved. Openai
Later on Wednesday, OpenAI reported failures affecting updates to Custom GPTs, which are user-built versions of ChatGPT configured for specific roles or workflows, and later said services had fully recovered. Openai
TechRadar, which tracked the outage in a live blog, said users reported ChatGPT problems in multiple countries as OpenAI posted updates about elevated error rates and mitigation efforts. Techradar
ChatGPT competes with other consumer AI chatbots such as Alphabet’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude, as companies jockey for users and enterprise clients.
But OpenAI has not disclosed what caused the disruptions, and repeated glitches can raise questions for businesses building tools on top of its services. A longer interruption would likely sharpen concerns about how much work can safely depend on a single provider.
As of Wednesday morning, OpenAI’s status page listed its systems as fully operational. Openai
