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OpenAI restored ChatGPT services late Tuesday following a major outage that left thousands of users unable to access the AI chatbot. The disruption began around 3:00 PM ET on 3 February 2026, causing a sudden spike in error reports across the United States and several international regions.
Data from the outage-tracking website Downdetector showed that reports surged from a handful to over 12,000 within thirty minutes. Affected users encountered persistent "Hmm... something seems to have gone wrong" error messages. The failure impacted nearly every facet of the platform, including conversation history, image generation via DALL-E, search functions, and the recently launched Codex tools.
OpenAI acknowledged the issue on its official status page, noting "elevated error rates" for both ChatGPT and Platform users. The company’s engineering team identified the cause and implemented a mitigation strategy shortly after the peak of the disruption. By 6:30 PM ET, OpenAI confirmed that all systems were fully operational.
The outage follows a period of high traffic 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. Additionally, Apple 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 happened in stages. While users in the United States saw a rapid decline in errors by 4:00 PM ET, international users in regions like the United Kingdom and Hungary reported a slower return to normalcy.
OpenAI continues to monitor the system to ensure performance remains consistent. This incident marks one of the most visible disruptions for the chatbot in 2026, highlighting the growing reliance of businesses and students on AI tools for daily operations.