ChatGPT hits third global outage in five days

OpenAI's ChatGPT went down for users worldwide on Saturday, July 25, 2026, marking the latest in a string of service disruptions that have plagued the AI chatbot throughout the week. The outage left thousands unable to log in, send prompts, or access conversation history across the web app, mobile applications, and developer APIs.

Scope of the Disruption

Outage-tracking platform Downdetector recorded a sharp spike in user complaints, with reports in India crossing 1,500 and continuing to rise, according to Moneycontrol. BleepingComputer confirmed that OpenAI acknowledged the worldwide outage, with users unable to load chats including previous conversations. Gulf News reported that the disruption affected users across the United States, Europe, India, Japan, Australia, and the UAE.bleepingcomputer+2

Downdetector data showed that approximately 80 percent of reported problems were tied to core ChatGPT functionality, with app-related issues and API connectivity accounting for the remainder. The Codex coding platform was also affected. OpenAI's status page flagged the trouble under an "Elevated error rates" notice, stating its teams were investigating.gulfnews+1

A Week of Instability

The Friday outage capped a turbulent week for OpenAI's services. On Tuesday, July 21, hundreds of users reported problems with ChatGPT's image generation and broader functionality, with Downdetector logging a spike in complaints beginning around 8:03 a.m. ET. MacRumors confirmed a partial outage for image generation that day, with OpenAI noting it was "still implementing the mitigation".sundayguardianlive+1

On Thursday, July 23, another outage struck ChatGPT, Codex, and OpenAI's APIs, with users experiencing elevated error rates for hours. Android Authority reported that OpenAI applied mitigation fixes and monitored recovery, but the issue was not fully resolved until nearly 24 hours later on July 24.androidauthority

Increasing Reliability Concerns

OpenAI's system status dashboard puts ChatGPT's recent uptime at 99.66 percent, APIs at 99.93 percent, and Codex at 99.98 percent. While those figures suggest outages remain the exception, the frequency of disruptions in July 2026 has drawn attention. A Polymarket prediction market asked traders to wager on the number of ChatGPT outage days in July, with the leading outcome at "3" with 47 percent probability as of late June.polymarket+1

OpenAI has not publicly disclosed a common root cause linking the week's incidents. Previous outages this year have been attributed to configuration changes, upstream provider failures, and deployment errors.pingdom