OpenAI’s flagship AI chatbot, ChatGPT, experienced a major global outage early Monday, leaving millions of users unable to access services across web, mobile, and API platforms.
The company confirmed the disruption, citing “elevated error rates and latency” affecting ChatGPT and related services. Downdetector, a real-time outage tracking website, reported the first wave of complaints beginning around 4:00 AM ET, with users across the world—including India, Europe, and North America—reporting widespread service failures.
“We are observing elevated error rates and latency across ChatGPT and the API,” OpenAI stated on its status page.
In India, 88% of user complaints were related to the chatbot failing to respond to prompts, 8% reported problems with the mobile application, and 3% flagged issues involving the API.
By mid-morning, OpenAI engineers had reportedly identified the root cause of the outage. The company issued a follow-up update at 10:54 AM ET, noting that “full recovery across all listed services may take another few hours.”
OpenAI’s official status dashboard reflected multiple ongoing issues, with:
14 affected components across API services including Chat, Images, Files, Audio, Realtime, and Responses.
21 service disruptions noted for ChatGPT specifically, impacting platforms like iOS, Android, WhatsApp, Web, DALL·E, and Desktop.
Sora, OpenAI’s text-to-video model, also registered four service issues.
The outage has had immediate ripple effects in the workforce, where ChatGPT is widely used for tasks ranging from email composition and research assistance to real-time customer support and data analysis. Many professionals rely on the AI for productivity tools during the workday, and its downtime has caused significant disruption.
The incident comes amid increasing global dependence on generative AI tools, raising questions about system resilience, infrastructure scalability, and emergency response protocols in AI service delivery.
