Problem Solutions
Is ChatGPT Down? How to Check in 30 Seconds
ChatGPT will not load, replies fail, or the page shows an error. Before you spend twenty minutes troubleshooting your own setup, spend thirty seconds answering the real question: is the service itself down? Half the time, it is — and no amount of refreshing your browser will fix that.
The 30-second check
Step one: open OpenAI's official status page (status.openai.com). It shows the current state of ChatGPT, the API, and related services, including active incidents and degraded performance. This is the authoritative source — if it shows an incident, the problem is confirmed and you can stop troubleshooting.
Step two: try one quick isolation test. Open a new chat and send a short message. If that fails too, try loading the service on a different network — switch from Wi-Fi to mobile data. If it works on mobile data but not your Wi-Fi, the problem is your network, not the service. If it fails everywhere, it is the service.
Third-party confirmation
If the status page looks green but the service still fails for you, check a third-party outage tracker such as Downdetector. These sites aggregate user reports, so a spike in reports tells you other people are hitting the same problem — useful when an outage is too new or too partial to appear on the official page yet.
A quick search on X or another social network for "ChatGPT down" works the same way. During real outages, the complaints appear within minutes. Just remember that social media also amplifies individual problems, so treat a handful of posts as a hint, not a verdict.
Common false alarms
Many "outages" are local. Login loops and session errors are usually fixed by signing out and back in, or by clearing the site's cookies. A VPN or corporate network can block or throttle the service — try with it off. Browser extensions, especially ad blockers and privacy tools, can break the page; test in an incognito window with extensions disabled. And rate limits are not outages: on some plans, sending too many messages too fast triggers a temporary "too many requests" error that clears on its own.
How often does this happen?
Short answer: minor blips are common, major outages are not. A service used by hundreds of millions of people will have brief periods of degraded performance every week — a few slow minutes here, a failed reply there. Full outages, where nobody can get in, happen a handful of times a year and are usually resolved within hours. If you depend on the service for daily work, that pattern is worth planning around: keep a backup tool installed and know your alternative before you need it.
What to do during a real outage
First, save your work. Copy important conversation text somewhere safe — if the session is unstable, you may lose it. Second, do not keep hammering refresh; it will not speed up recovery and can trigger rate limiting on top of the outage. Third, switch to an alternative for urgent work: Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or Perplexity all cover most ChatGPT use cases well enough for a few hours.
Most ChatGPT outages resolve within an hour or two. Major ones are announced on the status page with updates as engineers work. Bookmark the status page now, while everything works — you will want it the next time the screen goes blank.