Is ChatGPT Down? How to Check the Official Status in 30 Seconds

ChatGPT stopped working for users worldwide on the morning of Saturday, July 25, 2026, and searches for “is ChatGPT down” spiked within minutes. Service is back, but the same question returns with every hiccup. Here is the fastest way to get a real answer, how to tell an outage apart from a problem on your own device, and what actually helps while you wait.

The quick answer

Check here first: status.openai.com, OpenAI’s official status page
What it shows: live state for ChatGPT, the API, Codex, and other components, plus uptime history
Today’s outage: began around 5am ET on July 25 and was resolved in roughly 50 minutes
Right now: the status page reports OpenAI is fully operational
If the status page is green but ChatGPT still fails for you, the problem is likely local, not global

How to check in 30 seconds

Open status.openai.com in any browser
Read the banner at the top. “We’re fully operational” means OpenAI sees no problem on its side
Scroll to System status and find the row for the product you use: ChatGPT, APIs, or Codex. Each is broken into components so a partial outage is visible even when most of the service works
Use Subscribe to updates if you want to be told when an incident opens or closes instead of refreshing

That page is the authoritative source. Third-party outage trackers aggregate user reports, which is useful for spotting trouble early, but only OpenAI confirms what is actually broken.

Outage, or just you?

If the status page is green and ChatGPT still will not load, work through the local causes in order:

Reload with a hard refresh to bypass a stale cached page
Try a private or incognito window, which sidesteps extensions and cached logins
Sign out and back in, since login token problems produce errors that look like an outage
Try a different network (switch off Wi-Fi to mobile data). Corporate and school networks sometimes block or throttle the service
Try another device, which separates an app problem from an account problem

If it fails everywhere on every network while the status page stays green, the issue is more likely your account than the service.

What happened on July 25

Users worldwide lost access early Saturday, with reports of failed logins, conversations that would not load, and new chats that would not start. The disruption reached ChatGPT, the API, and Codex rather than one product alone. OpenAI acknowledged the problem on its status page and restored service in about 50 minutes, and the page now reports normal operation. The company has not published a technical cause.

What to do during an outage

Do not repeatedly retry a long prompt. During recovery, requests queue and retries slow things down for everyone
Copy unfinished prompts elsewhere before reloading, so a failed page does not take your work with it
Watch the status page rather than the app. It updates when the incident closes, and the app may lag behind
Ignore the flood of “fix” videos that appear during outages. When the service is down globally, nothing on your device fixes it

Bottom line

Bookmark status.openai.com. It answers “is ChatGPT down” faster than any search, distinguishes a real outage from a problem on your end, and tells you the moment service is restored. On July 25 the answer was yes, briefly, and it is green again now.

Status details verified against OpenAI’s official status page as of July 25, 2026. Outage timing reflects the incident reported that morning; this guide will be updated with the revision noted if OpenAI publishes further detail.