OpenAI Investigates Widespread Errors Affecting ChatGPT and Codex Services
OpenAI is actively investigating a significant increase in errors impacting its popular ChatGPT and Codex services, leading to degraded performance and potential disruptions for users and developers.
OpenAI has confirmed it is investigating a widespread service incident characterized by elevated errors affecting its ChatGPT and Codex platforms. The company has marked the issue as "Investigating" on its status page, indicating that its engineering teams are aware of abnormal behavior but have not yet identified a definitive root cause or provided a timeline for resolution.
The disruption impacts users of both ChatGPT, a widely adopted conversational AI, and Codex, a tool crucial for software development and code generation. According to OpenAI's status update, the incident affects multiple components within both services, potentially leading to a range of user-facing problems. These include failed requests, unexpected error messages, delayed responses, interrupted conversations, and difficulties accessing specific product functionalities.
For developers and security professionals who rely on Codex for their coding workflows, the degraded performance could translate to reduced reliability in tasks such as code generation, debugging, automation, and repository analysis. The full extent of the impact, including which specific features, geographic regions, account types, or underlying infrastructure are most affected, remains unclear.
The incident was first publicly noted on September 3, 2026, and remained under active investigation by OpenAI's technical staff. While OpenAI's broader system status dashboard may show high uptime for its services, this does not preclude partial outages affecting individual components, which can still significantly disrupt user experience and workflows.
This event occurs amidst broader industry attention on service disruptions affecting major AI providers. Recently, Anthropic's Claude AI platform also experienced an outage, underscoring the operational risks for organizations that have become increasingly dependent on cloud-hosted AI models for critical business functions.
Organizations leveraging ChatGPT and Codex for essential operations, such as security operations centers using AI for alert summarization, development teams for code review, or content creators for drafting reports, may experience slowdowns. The integration of these AI tools into CI/CD pipelines, developer tooling, and internal knowledge systems means that service degradation can have a cascading effect on productivity.
In response to such disruptions, enterprises are advised to monitor OpenAI's official status page for the most accurate and up-to-date information. It is also prudent to have contingency plans in place, including activating fallback processes such as utilizing local development tools, employing manual review procedures, or relying on cached documentation until normal service is restored.
At present, OpenAI has not attributed the elevated errors to any specific cause, such as a cyberattack, data breach, infrastructure failure, or third-party dependency issue. The current advisory solely confirms degraded performance and an ongoing investigation. Users experiencing issues are advised to retry requests cautiously and to preserve any relevant error timestamps or request identifiers for potential support follow-up.