OpenAI reports widespread ChatGPT service outages

OpenAI reported widespread errors across ChatGPT on 29 September 2026. Shortly before 15:00 Argentina time, outage-tracking platform Downdetector logged nearly 1,000 incident reports tied to OpenAI, with 85% pointing directly to issues with ChatGPT.

The company's status page confirmed that users experienced trouble sending queries, logging in, creating accounts, and completing tasks inside ChatGPT. Outage reports dropped below 100 shortly after 15:30 Argentina time, but rebounded above 500 reports roughly 15 minutes later.

The service disruptions hit while OpenAI held its annual developer conference, which began that morning. During the event, the company unveiled Dots, a new artificial intelligence assistant designed to compete with Meta's Muse model.

Anthropic's Claude also experienced a sharp spike in incident reports earlier that day. Downdetector recorded more than 11,000 issue reports for Claude around 11:15 Argentina time. Both services had previously suffered simultaneous disruptions in early September 2026, and ChatGPT's Work agent registered latency and errors lasting nearly three hours in August.

OpenAI is seeking to raise at least $30 billion in a funding round that could value the company at about $1.4 trillion. It continues to delay an initial public offering amid artificial intelligence risk concerns raised across the sector, including by CEO Sam Altman. OpenAI runs its models across multiple cloud providers, with Microsoft Azure serving as its primary partner.