ChatGPT goes down as login and signup systems fail worldwide

OpenAI's ChatGPT went down on Wednesday evening, leaving users worldwide unable to log in, create accounts, or load previous conversations. The outage began at approximately 8 PM ET on August 19, 2026, and affected multiple OpenAI services beyond the flagship chatbot.

Authentication Failure Disrupts Services

According to OpenAI's status page, the company confirmed the issue at 8:03 PM ET, stating it was "working on implementing a mitigation." The root cause appeared to be the platform's inability to retrieve authentication verification keys, which prevented logins and signups across ChatGPT, the Codex coding platform, and as many as 12 API endpoints.forbes+2

Users attempting to access ChatGPT encountered loading animations that never resolved, "too many concurrent requests" errors, and failures when trying to send messages. Reports on Downdetector surged around 5 PM PT, with users in both the United States and Europe affected.bleepingcomputer+2

Partial Functionality Remained

Despite the widespread disruption, some services continued to operate. According to testing by 9to5Mac, ChatGPT's Mac desktop app remained functional, though the web version intermittently failed to load chat history, account projects, or generate responses. Forbes reported that while logins and signups were down, the core ChatGPT service itself remained operational for users who were already authenticated.9to5mac+1

OpenAI Acknowledged the Problem Quickly

OpenAI marked the incident as "identified" by 8:15 PM ET, roughly 14 minutes after it began, according to BleepingComputer, which noted that issues persisted in its own testing at that time. The company's rapid acknowledgment followed a familiar pattern for large-scale cloud services, where authentication systems represent a single point of failure capable of disrupting an entire platform even when underlying infrastructure remains intact.bleepingcomputer