Thousands of users experienced disruptions when ChatGPT suffered a major outage on February 3, 2026. The service interruption started around 3:00 PM ET and left users unable to access the popular AI chatbot for several hours before OpenAI restored full functionality by early evening.
Reports of problems surged dramatically within a short period. Data from the outage-tracking website Downdetector showed that complaints jumped from nearly zero to over 12,000 within thirty minutes of the disruption beginning. Users attempting to access ChatGPT encountered persistent error messages reading “Hmm… something seems to have gone wrong.”
Impact Across Multiple Services
The outage affected nearly every aspect of the platform. Users reported issues with conversation history, image generation through DALL-E, search functions, and the recently launched Codex tools. OpenAI acknowledged the problem on its official status page, confirming that “elevated error rates” were impacting both ChatGPT and Platform users. All 13 components of ChatGPT were listed as experiencing degraded performance during the peak of the disruption.
OpenAI’s engineering team worked quickly to identify the cause and implement a mitigation strategy. The company posted updates stating they were “working on implementing a mitigation” shortly after the problem emerged. By 5:14 PM ET, the initial outage was marked as resolved. OpenAI confirmed that all systems were fully operational by 6:30 PM ET.
Possible Connection to Recent Growth
The timing of the outage followed a period of significant traffic increases for the company. On Monday, OpenAI released a native Codex app for macOS, which CEO Sam Altman reported received over 200,000 downloads on its first day. Apple also recently updated its Xcode environment to include AI-powered coding assistance using OpenAI models. While OpenAI did not specify the exact cause of the failure, some analysts suggest the surge in new users and API calls from these integrations may have strained the existing infrastructure.
Service recovery occurred in stages across different regions. Users in the United States saw a rapid decline in errors by 4:00 PM ET. However, international users in regions including the United Kingdom and Hungary reported a slower return to normal service.
Ongoing API Issues
Although the main outage was resolved, OpenAI issued an ongoing status alert concerning the fine-tuning aspect of its API service. The company’s latest communication stated, “We have implemented the mitigation and are overseeing the recovery” for this remaining issue.
Claude Also Affected
ChatGPT was not the only AI chatbot to experience problems that day. Claude, developed by Anthropic, also faced an outage with similar issues. Anthropic reported “elevated error rates on the API across all Claude models.” That situation was resolved by 1 PM ET, several hours before ChatGPT’s problems were fixed.
This incident marks one of the most visible disruptions for ChatGPT in 2026. The widespread impact highlighted the growing reliance of businesses and students on AI tools for daily operations. OpenAI continues to monitor the system to ensure performance remains consistent following the restoration of services.
