Global outage of ChatGPT and OpenAI APIs. What is known about it?

On January 23, 2025, a global outage occurred in the ChatGPT chatbot systems and the OpenAI API. The issue has been resolved, but not all user services are working properly.

The problem and its scope

During the outage, the chatbot homepage displayed an error message: "Unable to start a chat," and when attempting to contact the bot, the following text appeared: If this problem persists, please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com."

Some users also had trouble accessing the OpenAI platform at platform.openai.com.

Power outages were reported from all over the world, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Russia, and other countries.

OpenAI officially acknowledged the issue in a statement on its status page. It cited a "high error rate" in the ChatGPT and OpenAI API systems.

Recovery progress

Within half an hour of the outage, OpenAI engineers identified the root cause of the issue and began fixing it. Within an hour, access to ChatGPT and the API was restored.

However, 20 minutes later, the system was again unavailable worldwide. OpenAI said it was experiencing a "high error rate" again. error rate" and is working to fix the problem.

Previous incidents

This is not the first time that OpenAI has encountered global problems with its services. In late December 2024, ChatGPT, the OpenAI API, and the Sora video text generation system went down. The cause was then attributed to a failure at an "upstream provider" that OpenAI did not name.