OpenAI Confirms Error Spike and Full Service Restoration.
ChatGPT experienced a temporary global outage earlier today, causing widespread login failures, stalled responses, and elevated error rates for users worldwide. The issue, which surfaced on December 2, 2025, affected ChatGPT across web, mobile, and API services, before OpenAI issued a confirmation and began rolling out a fix.
According to OpenAI’s official status page, the company detected the disruption at around 2:40 PM ET, acknowledging that “users are experiencing elevated errors across multiple services.” The outage impacted both free and paid ChatGPT users, including ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise customers.
OpenAI completed its mitigation rollout by 3:12 PM ET, announcing that recovery was underway and systems were stabilizing. Engineers continued to monitor the platform for additional issues to ensure full restoration.
What happened during the ChatGPT outage?
During the disruption, millions of users reported that ChatGPT was:
- Not generating responses
- Timing out on simple queries
- Failing to load chat history
- Producing “network error” or “something went wrong” messages
- Freezing mid-conversation on mobile and desktop
This aligns with the type of instability seen earlier in November, when a surge in requests caused temporary rate-limit errors across OpenAI’s hosted services.
Possible cause of the outage
While OpenAI has not publicly disclosed the root cause, early indicators suggest:
- A sudden spike in global traffic, likely from holiday season usage
- Increased load from AI shopping tools and Sora video generation features
- Backend model switching or infrastructure scaling updates
Recent updates like OpenAI’s new shopping research tool, memory upgrades, and expanded API features may also be contributing to heavier server loads.
ChatGPT is now fully operational
OpenAI has confirmed that ChatGPT is back online and stable, with all major services functioning normally. Users can resume generating responses, accessing chat history, and running API calls without interruptions.
If you’re still experiencing problems, OpenAI recommends:
- Refreshing your browser
- Logging out and back in
- Clearing cache
- Updating to the latest app version
With ChatGPT powering educational tools, enterprise workflows, and productivity apps globally, outages like today highlight the increasing dependency on large-scale AI systems. As demand for generative AI continues to grow, companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are investing heavily in new datacenters, GPU clusters, and more resilient infrastructure.
