ChatGPT suffered a major global outage on Saturday 25 July, leaving users across the United States, Europe, Asia and the United Arab Emirates unable to log in or load conversations, according to reports on the monitoring site DownDetector. OpenAI confirmed on its status page that it was "experiencing issues" with "elevated error rates" across ChatGPT, its mobile application and the developer platform Codex. The company said it had "applied the mitigation" and was "monitoring the recovery".

More than 3,000 users flagged the problem on DownDetector, with 79 per cent of reports relating to OpenAI concerning ChatGPT, 9 per cent the app and 8 per cent Codex, according to the site. In the UAE, outage reports peaked around 1:25pm local time, with 68 per cent of issues linked to core ChatGPT operations, 18 per cent to the app and 9 per cent to API services and Codex, DownDetector data showed. In India, complaints crossed 1,000 and continued to rise sharply, with 78 per cent related to general ChatGPT functionality.

OpenAI later updated its status page to say the service was "fully operational" again just after midday on Saturday, according to The Independent. The outage followed a separate disruption on 23 July that affected ChatGPT, Codex and the APIs and required nearly 24 hours to resolve, La Stampa reported. Gulf News noted another temporary outage a few weeks earlier in which ChatGPT could process basic text queries but failed on image generation and Codex execution.

OpenAI has not yet clarified the technical cause of the 25 July outage. The company said it was investigating the issue, and no evidence of a cyber attack has emerged, according to La Stampa. The status page remains the primary channel for updates on service restoration.