ChatGPT Down for Thousands of Users in the US

ChatGPT down reports surged across the United States on Tuesday afternoon as thousands of users experienced problems accessing OpenAI’s chatbot, according to outage tracking data.

Downdetector, a website that tracks service disruptions by collecting user reports, showed a sharp spike in complaints beginning around 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time.

By 3:25 p.m. ET, more than 12,000 users had reported issues with ChatGPT. The number of reports peaked shortly after 3:20 p.m., climbing above 13,000 compared with a normal baseline of just 19 reports.

Outage reports began easing later in the afternoon. Just before 4:00 p.m. ET, reported incidents had fallen to about 3,722 and dropped below 1,000 shortly afterward, according to Downdetector.

OpenAI acknowledged the disruption on its official status page, saying it had applied the “necessary mitigations” and was actively monitoring the recovery. The company said the outage impacted all ChatGPT features.

Users reported problems across conversations, search, image generation, Codex, Atlas, and other tools, indicating a broad service disruption rather than a limited feature outage.

The incident came a day after OpenAI launched the Codex app for Mac, which CEO Sam Altman said surpassed 200,000 downloads on its first day. On the same day as the outage, Apple released an update to Xcode that added agentic coding support for both Codex and Claude.

While there is no indication that these recent launches directly caused the outage, increased usage following the Codex release may have contributed to system strain.

OpenAI has not yet provided further technical details about the cause of the disruption. The company said it continues to monitor service recovery.

This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.

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