OpenAI's ChatGPT faces global outage, services restored
Thousands of users, including those in India, were affected by widespread disruption across ChatGPT, Sora, and GPT API early on July 16
OpenAI’s ChatGPT experienced widespread global outage early on Wednesday (16 July), leaving thousands of users unable to access the popular AI chatbot.
The disruption, which began around 6.10 AM IST today, also affected related services such as Sora and the GPT API.
This marks the second major outage this month, raising concerns about the reliability of the platform amid surging demand for AI tools.
Also Read: ChatGPT faces global outage; highest number of disruptions in India, US
Services hit globally
The service interruption appears to have impacted users across all major regions globally, with the highest number of reports coming from North America, Europe, and Asia, including India.
According to DownDetector, a platform that tracks service outages, approximately 88 per cent of users reported being completely unable to access ChatGPT, while the remainder encountered issues with the website or mobile app.
Also Read: Meta launches standalone AI app to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT
Users affected
Many users reported blank chat windows, incomplete responses. Some of the users reportedly had issues with the login as the chatbot was not able to move ahead the verification process.
Others were unable to view their chat history or reportedly encountered unusual error messages while trying to access their previous conversations.
Several users also reported sudden disconnections during active sessions, particularly while working on code or video generation using tools like Codex and Sora, resulting in lost progress.
Also Read: 10 per cent of the world now uses ChatGPT, claims Sam Altman
OpenAI responds
In its latest update, OpenAI confirmed that all impacted services have now been fully restored.
Earlier, OpenAI acknowledged the outage on its status page and stated that the the company is working on a fix. The company also confirmed that the outage was affecting ChatGPT as well as other products like Sora and Codex.
"We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation," Open AI said.
While OpenAI has resolved the issue, it has not yet disclosed the root cause — whether it was a server overload, a software glitch, or another technical failure.