Is ChatGPT down right now? What’s happening and what users can do

ChatGPT experienced service disruptions on Wednesday, February 4, 2026, with users reporting errors, failed loads, and intermittent access problems across the web and mobile apps. As of 1:44 p.m. ET, the service was in a recovery phase after mitigations were applied, with some users still seeing limited availability.

ChatGPT status on Feb. 4, 2026

The latest service advisories indicate elevated error rates and degraded availability for ChatGPT, followed by mitigation steps and active monitoring as systems stabilize. Users reported a range of problems, including chats not loading, projects failing to open, missing conversation history, and responses failing to generate.

The disruption Wednesday followed a similar wave of issues the prior day, when a large spike of user reports suggested a broad, short-lived outage that later eased.

When did the outage start and how long did it last?

On Wednesday, the uptick in reports began late morning on the U.S. East Coast, with a rapid rise in complaints soon after. Updates posted during the midday window indicated the issue was recognized and that mitigation was implemented, followed by a monitoring period as recovery continued.

A separate disruption was widely reported on Tuesday, February 3, 2026, when user complaints surged into the tens of thousands before falling sharply later in the afternoon. By late afternoon Tuesday, availability appeared to improve significantly for many users.

Because outages can affect regions and features unevenly, some people may see normal performance while others continue to hit errors, especially during the “monitoring” phase.

Why ChatGPT may be “not working” for you

During high-traffic incidents or partial outages, ChatGPT can fail in several ways that look similar on the surface but have different causes:

• Login or session issues (you can’t sign in, or the app loops)

• Conversation loading failures (history, projects, or threads won’t open)

• Generation errors (“something went wrong” messages, timeouts, stalled responses)

• Feature-specific problems (uploads, tools, or image features failing while basic chat works)

Even when the service is recovering, you may see intermittent errors until backend systems fully rebalance and caches refresh.

What to try if ChatGPT is down or acting up

If you’re trying to figure out “is chatgpt down right now” versus a local problem, these quick checks usually help:

• Refresh and try a new chat (temporary errors often clear on retry during recovery)

• Sign out and back in (session tokens can get stuck after partial outages)

• Try a different network or disable VPN (some routing or security layers can worsen timeouts)

• Clear cache/cookies or use a private window (browser state can trigger repeated failures)

If none of those help and you’re seeing widespread errors, it’s more likely to be a service-side incident rather than your device.

What happens next and what to watch for

In the next few hours, the key signals are whether error rates keep falling and whether access stabilizes across the most-used features (loading history, starting chats, and generating responses). After a mitigation step, services can improve in waves—meaning performance may appear fixed, then briefly degrade again as traffic returns and systems rebalance.

If you’re working on something time-sensitive, the safest approach during a recovery window is to save drafts locally, keep prompts short, and avoid large uploads until the service is consistently stable.

Sources consulted: OpenAI Status, OpenAI Help Center, Reuters, Downdetector