On September 3, 2026, ChatGPT became unavailable to users worldwide. People cannot log in, load conversations, or send requests—the service is unresponsive.

These are not isolated latency issues, as was the case a few days ago. This is a complete global outage.

What Happened

At this time, there are no specific details about the cause. OpenAI has officially confirmed that the incident is underway. A notice about an active outage has appeared on the company’s status page, and engineers are working on a fix. The first reports of issues began coming in on DownDetector and via social media around 6:00 p.m. Over the first 30 minutes, the number of complaints grew exponentially.

Users are reporting:

“A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again”

“Bad gateway” errors

Complete inability to load the app

It’s also not working on mobile versions

Scale of the problem

According to OpenAI, ChatGPT is used by more than 300 million people every week. Not all of them were active at that moment, but even if only 10% of users were online, we’re talking about 30 million people who were affected.

Students can’t finish their AI-based homework. Developers can’t test integrations. Companies that rely on the ChatGPT API are losing access. For comparison: in January 2025, the outage lasted about 2 hours. In June 2025, it lasted more than 10 hours. This one could last even longer.

Why This Matters

ChatGPT has become more than just a tool—it’s infrastructure. People rely on it just as they do on Google Search or email services. When other services go down (GitHub sometimes experiences downtime), the world takes notice. When ChatGPT goes down, it makes a much bigger splash because it’s more in the public eye. Meme culture about the “cheating AI” instantly floods social media. But behind the memes lie real losses. People pay $200 a month for Plus and Pro subscriptions. Companies pay for the API. And the service is simply unavailable.


Sources: OpenAI Status Page, DownDetector, Twitter/X, and real user reports at the time of writing.