OpenAI’s status page opened a new incident at 16:58 CEST on September 3 — “Elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex.” The disruption was global in scope: Downdetector logged more than 35,000 reports in the United States alone, with thousands more from India and hundreds from Bangladesh, and multiple outlets described users “around the world” losing access.
The company says it is investigating; 15 ChatGPT components and 4 Codex components are listed as affected. No root cause and no fix have been confirmed yet, and OpenAI has not classified this as a full outage on its own status page — its official severity label remains “degraded performance,” not total unavailability, even as the geographic reach of the reports was worldwide.
This is a separate, later incident from the six-minute Work Mode error logged earlier the same day. Status: ongoing, unresolved.
UPDATE (September 3, 2026, CEST): OpenAI’s incident moved from investigation to mitigation to full resolution over the course of the afternoon. According to independent reporting, the underlying disruption actually began around 12:58 CEST and ran for close to four hours, easing off by roughly 16:56 CEST — two minutes before OpenAI’s public “investigating” notice went live at 16:58 CEST. In total, 19 components were affected across ChatGPT and Codex, including conversations, login, file uploads, voice mode, search, and image generation.
The disruption’s reach was global: Downdetector logged more than 35,000 reports in the United States alone, with thousands more from India and hundreds from Bangladesh, and outlets on multiple continents described users losing access simultaneously.
Independent reporting from The Verge, India Today, and Hindustan Times indicates this was not an OpenAI-only event — Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok reportedly experienced simultaneous elevated errors during the same window, making it a rare multi-provider incident rather than a single-company outage.
OpenAI has still not named a root cause. No official statement attributing the disruption to a specific technical fault — routing-related or otherwise — has been independently verified as of this writing.
Author:
Jan Bielik
CEO & Founder of Webiano Digital & Marketing Agency
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