ChatGPT outage reported
Archived — this story has rotated out of today’s deck. It is kept here in full.
The gist
OpenAI confirmed a partial outage of ChatGPT Work on Aug 31, 2026, with 1,405 user reports.
The outage hits businesses relying on ChatGPT for daily tasks, following a similar incident.
Background
On August 31, 2026, ChatGPT experienced a service disruption, with users reporting network errors and slow responses. OpenAI acknowledged the issue on its status page, describing it as a partial outage affecting ChatGPT Work, a feature for creating documents and presentations. This incident came days after a similar problem on August 27, raising concerns as businesses increasingly depend on ChatGPT for various tasks.
How it unfolded
- Aug 27, 2026OpenAI reported elevated error rates affecting ChatGPT Work and Workspace Agents; mitigation applied and services recovered.
- Aug 31, 2026 11:00ChatGPT Work outage started around 11 a.m. EST, with users across multiple subscription plans unable to start or continue tasks.
- Aug 31, 2026 12:15Downdetector reported 1,405 OpenAI outages at peak.
- Aug 31, 2026 13:30ChatGPT posted on X acknowledging the outage and working on a fix.
- Aug 31, 2026 14:30ChatGPT reiterated on X that ChatGPT Work is down and they are working on a fix.
Who’s saying what
- Official
- OpenAI stated it is seeing elevated errors and latency and is working on implementing a mitigation.
- Public
- Users reported network errors, slow responses, and inability to start or continue tasks, with over 1,300 reports on Downdetector.
Still unverified
The root cause of the outage is not confirmed; some speculate it may be related to Microsoft Azure, but this is not verified.