ChatGPT services restored late Tuesday after a global outage left thousands of users stranded mid-conversation. The disruption began around 3:00 PM ET on February 3, 2026, according to outage tracker Downdetector.
More than 12,000 users reported problems with the platform within thirty minutes, with reports peaking at over 20,000 according to one outage tracker. Users encountered persistent "Hmm...something seems to have gone wrong" error messages that prevented access to conversations and responses.
OpenAI confirmed elevated error rates affecting both ChatGPT and Platform users through its official status page. The company identified issues across 14 components, including one API-related service and 13 ChatGPT-specific features.
Engineers deployed fixes promptly, with OpenAI confirming primary resolution by 5:14 PM ET. Full service restoration occurred by 6:30 PM ET, though international users in regions like the United Kingdom and Hungary reported slower recovery.
The outage impacted nearly all core ChatGPT features, including conversation history, image generation via DALL-E, search functions, and the recently launched Codex tools. Professionals and developers who rely on the AI chatbot for daily workflows faced particular disruption.
OpenAI's disruption followed a period of high traffic for the company. The firm released a native Codex app for macOS on Monday, which CEO Sam Altman reported received over 200,000 downloads on its first day. Apple recently updated its Xcode environment to include AI-powered coding assistance using OpenAI models.
Anthropic's Claude chatbot experienced a separate but comparable outage earlier the same day. Users reported widespread API errors across all Claude models, disrupting developers and enterprise users. Anthropic confirmed full resolution by 1:00 PM ET.
This incident marks one of the most visible disruptions for ChatGPT in 2026, highlighting growing business and student reliance on AI tools for daily operations.
OpenAI continues to monitor system stability as performance steadily improves.
ChatGPT outages have become more frequent on the platform. The AI chatbot experienced downtime on January 23, 2025, when thousands reported inaccessibility, followed by another outage the following month where prompts failed to function properly.
Service recovery happened in stages across different regions. While United States users saw rapid error decline by 4:00 PM ET, international recovery patterns varied based on local infrastructure and network conditions.
OpenAI has not disclosed the technical cause behind the outage. The company stated mitigation steps have been applied and performance is improving as teams monitor system stability.
