Is ChatGPT Down? Thousands Of Users Report Outage As Chats Fail To Load

Users globally took to social media on Wednesday to report issues while using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with many flagging problems accessing the service. Large numbers of users turned to Downdetector to log complaints

and check whether the outage was widespread.

At the time of writing this report, any prompt entered in a new ChatGPT chat or an ongoing conversation was returning a “Hmm…something seems to have gone wrong” error message.

“We’re currently experiencing issues,” OpenAI said on its official status page.

“We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation,” the company added.

“We have identified the issue, applied the necessary mitigations and are monitoring the recovery,” OpenAI later said in its status page.

It also confirmed that the outage was affecting nearly all ChatGPT features, including conversations, search, image generation, Codex, Atlas and other services.

The disruption comes a day after OpenAI launched the Codex app for Mac, which has seen strong early demand. CEO Sam Altman revealed that the app achieved more than 200,000 downloads on its first day. On Wednesday, Apple also introduced an update to Xcode that adds agentic coding support for both Codex and Claude.

As soon as anything except Twitter goes down, the only correct course of action is search ‘ChatGPT down’ / ‘Instagram down’ on Twitter to make sure you’re not the only one right?

— Marc Johnson (@marcjohnson27) February 3, 2026

As reports of ChatGPT being down spread rapidly, searches for “ChatGPT down” on X surged, with users sharing memes, jokes and quick reactions. Many joked about suddenly having to rely on their own brains, while others humorously noted how they rushed to X to confirm whether the outage was global as OpenAI worked on a fix.

“As soon as anything except Twitter goes down, the only correct course of action is search ‘ChatGPT down’ / ‘Instagram down’ on Twitter to make sure you’re not the only one right?” wrote X user Marc Johnson.

“How fast I came to X Twitter to see if ChatGPT was down #chatgpt,” another user posted.