OpenAI Outage History

The incident affected OpenAI's Realtime API, Chat Completions, and Text Embeddings, causing elevated latency and degraded user experiences. The disruption began at Aug 21, 2025 7:16 PM UTC when the status page moved to a degraded performance alert. By Aug 21, 2025 8:16 PM UTC, Embeddings and Completions had recovered to normal, while Realtime latency persisted until the final recovery later that evening. The outage duration spanned roughly four hours, with full restoration by Aug 21, 2025 11:11 PM UTC.

OpenAI Sora services experienced a short outage with elevated error rates and latency across five Sora components: Login, Image Generation, Video generation, Video viewing, and Feed. The incident began at Aug 20, 2025 6:21 PM UTC and was resolved by Aug 20, 2025 6:51 PM UTC. The provider posted 2 status updates during the incident and noted that mitigation steps were being implemented.

Impact was felt by users who could not sign in, generate content, or access prompts and feeds. Reports described errors loading pages, 404 messages, and prompts not loading or uploading, with issues appearing across multiple regions during the incident window. The volume and spread of user reports indicated a widespread disruption during this period.

OpenAI's Sora team implemented mitigation steps per the status updates, and services returned to normal after about 30 minutes. The affected components were restored to normal operation as the incident was resolved.

OpenAI Sora experienced degraded performance and intermittent issues impacting Login, Image Generation, Video Generation, Video Viewing, and the Feed. Users across multiple regions reported errors and slow responses as the service encountered elevated error rates. StatusGator recorded an Early Warning Signal starting at Aug 20, 2025 5:52 PM UTC, indicating Sora was unavailable before OpenAI publicly acknowledged the issue. OpenAI flagged a degraded service at Aug 20, 2025 6:21 PM UTC and began applying mitigations. Affected components began restoring by Aug 20, 2025 6:51 PM UTC. The Early Warning Signal ended at Aug 20, 2025 7:03 PM UTC.

OpenAI experienced degraded performance affecting the ChatGPT Conversations experience, with users encountering loading failures, timeouts, and intermittent responses. The incident began at Aug 20, 2025 3:16 PM UTC and was resolved by Aug 20, 2025 5:41 PM UTC, lasting approximately 2 hours and 25 minutes. A large volume of user reports indicated widespread impact across regions.

OpenAI issued two official status updates during the outage, first noting degraded performance for ChatGPT Conversations and later confirming that the service had returned to normal. Engineers worked to restore full functionality, and the status page shows the transition back to normal service as the issue was resolved.

OpenAI experienced a subscription loading issue affecting ChatGPT across Web, Desktop (Windows and macOS), and the Login flow. Users reported elevated errors, blank screens, and failed loading of subscription features, with some cases showing a generic error message. The incident began at 10:06 AM UTC and produced a degraded experience for users until mitigation was announced at 11:41 AM UTC, with full recovery by 3:11 PM UTC. Reports came from many regions, indicating broad, global impact rather than a localized outage.

OpenAI's ChatGPT services experienced an elevated error rate and degraded performance, impacting a broad set of features across desktop, web, and mobile experiences as well as GPT-powered tools. Users reported HTTP 500 errors, unresponsive chat histories, and sign-in issues, with activity observed across multiple regions. The outage began at 6:56 AM UTC and was resolved by 8:01 AM UTC.

OpenAI ChatGPT experienced degraded performance across many interfaces, with users reporting errors, timeouts, and failed requests affecting conversations and related features. The disruption impacted 23 components including Desktop - Windows, Desktop - macOS, WhatsApp, 1-800-CHAT-GPT, Search, DALL·E, Advanced Data Analysis, Context connectors, File uploads, GPT vision, Voice mode, Memory, Single Sign-On, Conversations, GPTs, Image Generation, Deep Research, Agent, Codex, Login, Web, and mobile apps (iOS/Android). The issue appeared to be global, with reports of HTTP errors, conversations not loading, and internal service errors. StatusGator detected the issue at Aug 20, 2025 6:40 AM UTC, about 16 minutes before OpenAI acknowledged the problem.

OpenAI reported elevated errors affecting the APIs / Files component during file uploads to vector stores. Users attempting to upload files may have encountered errors or delays. The incident began at Aug 19, 2025 4:46 PM UTC and lasted about 3 hours and 31 minutes, with the issue resolved by Aug 19, 2025 8:17 PM UTC. The provider published two official status updates during the incident, first noting elevated errors and later indicating the services had returned to normal. The impact appeared limited to a subset of users relying on file uploads to vector stores rather than a full platform outage.

OpenAI GPTs with custom actions within ChatGPT experienced a brief processing issue, causing delays or stalls for actions that require confirmation. The incident began at Aug 18, 2025 5:36 PM UTC and was resolved by Aug 18, 2025 9:16 PM UTC, lasting 3 hours and 40 minutes. OpenAI issued two status updates for the incident, first noting that GPTs with custom actions were stuck in processing after permission to proceed and that they were investigating, then confirming the system had returned to normal. Impact was limited to the affected GPTs with custom actions, with other features remaining available.

OpenAI's ChatGPT image rendering experienced an outage affecting mobile and desktop clients. The issue began at 3:06 PM UTC with images not loading on iOS and Android mobile devices, and expanded to desktop platforms (Windows and macOS) by 3:41 PM UTC, impacting both mobile and desktop experiences. The incident lasted roughly 3 hours and affected 4 components: ChatGPT / Mobile - iOS, ChatGPT / Mobile - Android, ChatGPT / Desktop - Windows, ChatGPT / Desktop - macOS. By 6:06 PM UTC, these components were restored to normal.