OpenAI develops and operates the most widely used AI models in the world, including GPT-4, ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the Whisper speech-to-text system. ChatGPT alone has over 200 million weekly active users, while the OpenAI API powers thousands of applications across every industry. Developers integrate OpenAI's models for code generation, content creation, data analysis, customer support automation, and countless other use cases through a REST API that processes billions of tokens daily.
OpenAI outages frequently stem from API rate limiting during peak demand, GPU compute capacity constraints for inference workloads, or model deployment issues when rolling out updated versions. ChatGPT and the API can experience independent outages since they run on partially separate infrastructure. Database connectivity issues for conversation history and user authentication failures are also common triggers for service disruptions.
When OpenAI goes down, AI-powered features break across thousands of applications simultaneously. Customer support chatbots stop responding, code completion tools freeze in IDEs, content generation workflows halt, and data processing pipelines that depend on GPT API calls fail silently or with errors. Companies that have deeply integrated OpenAI into their products face immediate user-facing outages with no quick fallback.
Use this page to check OpenAI's API and ChatGPT availability in real time. OpenAI's API and ChatGPT can experience independent outages — one may be working while the other is down. Check status.openai.com for official incident updates and scheduled maintenance windows.
ChatGPT issues usually fall into three categories: full outages (server errors), capacity limits (service is at capacity messages), or performance degradation (slow responses, incomplete outputs). During peak hours, free-tier users may experience rate limiting even when the service is technically operational for paid subscribers.
OpenAI experiences minor incidents multiple times per month, including API latency spikes and brief ChatGPT unavailability. Significant outages affecting all users typically occur 3-6 times per year. The frequency has decreased as OpenAI has scaled infrastructure, but demand continues to grow rapidly, creating ongoing capacity challenges.
If your application calls the OpenAI API synchronously, users will see errors or timeouts. Applications without proper error handling may crash entirely. Best practices include implementing retry logic with exponential backoff, caching frequent responses, setting reasonable timeouts, and having a fallback message when the API is unreachable.
Monitor the OpenAI API endpoint with PinusX Uptime Monitor for free — you'll get Slack or email alerts within 60 seconds of any disruption. This is more reliable than waiting for official status page updates, which can lag behind actual outages by several minutes.
Monitor OpenAI uptime with PinusX. Get instant alerts when services go down.