Starting around 9:30 a.m. Pacific, ChatGPT began suffering an outage. Reports quickly hit over 10,000 on the outage tracking site Down Detector.
Users reported that their projects wouldn't load or that ChatGPT wasn't providing answers to queries. In some cases, it wouldn't pull up chat histories or let people upload images.
The OpenAI official status page quickly acknowledged the issue and nearly as quickly applied a mitigation.
Today's outage is the second short interruption in as many days for ChatGPT with similar issues striking the AI assistant in the last few weeks.
Sudden Spike
Starting around 9:30 a.m. PT the outage tracking site Down Detector suddenly hit over 10,000 reports in a matter of minutes.
Some commentors on the site reported that their projects weren't loading or it wasn't pulling up chat history.
OpenAI has not acknowledged the issue yet
On OpenAI's official status page, there is no acknowledgement of the outage.
As of this posting, it lists everything as "fully operational" with all functions listed in green.
Conversations failed
ChatGPT down. #AI #ChatGPT pic.twitter.com/Y3qPUqnuWhFebruary 4, 2026
A ChatGPT user on Twitter posted screenshots of failed conversations and noted that they have a Pro account with OpenAI.
It echoes other comments that I'm seeing on Twitter and in Down Detector comments.
OpenAI investigating
OpenAI just caught up and updated its official status page acknowleding the outage.
"We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services."
So far, only ChatGPT appears to be affected. Sora and any APIs are still in the green.
Second sudden spike in as many days
A similar spike occurred yesterday, Feb. 3, that one wa short lived though and quickly went away.
So far, it's not clear if today's issue will follow a similar trajectory.
How are you affected?
ChatGPT down can’t load profile can’t upload images with error 403 in Toronto pic.twitter.com/1yPYa76wiFFebruary 4, 2026
On X, poster John Chen posted that ChatGPT wouldn't load his profile or let him upload images. He appears to be based out of Toronto. A fellow user said he was having issues in southern California.
Reports declining
We're about half an hour into today's issue.
The spike peaked at just over 15,000 reports on Down Detector. As of this posting, it sits around 4,200.
The OpenAI status page is still listing issues with a slightly new message.
"We are investigating the issue for the listed services," it now reads. The service experiencing issues is ChatGPT.
Mitigation applied
OpenAI says that it has applied a mitigation and are monitoring recovery for ChatGPT.
The outage is mostly over but we're keeping an eye on things incase it goes back down.
Calling it
Thanks for sticking around for today's brief ChatGPT outage. OpenAI hasn't suffered any major multihour outages recently but it has annoyingly been infected with this 35 to 45 minutes ones in recent weeks.
Today's spike is finally under 500 reports.
It's not yet clear where on the company's end the issue is stemming from. Likely it's infrastructural which means that OpenAI needs to bolster ChatGPT, but that is speculation.
