ChatGPT down for thousands of users worldwide

Reports of issues began surfacing at around 10:05am ET on Monday

Geo News Digital Desk

Published April 20, 2026

ChatGPT down for thousands of users worldwide

ChatGPT is experiencing a widespread outage, leaving thousands of users unable to access the platform. OpenAI has confirmed it is investigating the problem, which is also affecting Codex, its AI-powered coding tool.

Reports of issues began surfacing at around 10:05am ET on Monday, April 20, 2026. Outage tracking site, Downdetector, recorded a sudden surge in complaints shortly after.

At the time of writing, more than 7,600 users in the United Kingdom (U.K.) and 1,700 users in the United States (U.S.) had flagged problems.

According to OpenAI, a total of 12 components of ChatGPT and one component of Codex was affected in the outage.

ChatGPT – 12 Affected Components

Component	Status
Conversations	Partial Outage
Login	Partial Outage
Compliance API	Partial Outage
Search	Partial Outage
File uploads	Partial Outage
Voice mode	Partial Outage
GPTs	Partial Outage
Image Generation	Partial Outage
Deep Research	Partial Outage
Agent	Partial Outage
ChatGPT Atlas	Partial Outage
Connectors/Apps	Partial Outage

Codex – 1 Affected Component

Component	Status
Codex	Partial Outage

Incident Update: Users are unable to load ChatGPT, Codex and API Platform.
Status: Investigating • Mitigation applied and recovery being monitored
Time: Started around 19:35 UTC on April 20, 2026
Source: OpenAI Status Page

The outage appears to be over as OpenAI shared an update acknowledging the disruption, saying, “Users unable to load ChatGPT, Codex and API platforms.”

The San-Fracisco based company said that it had applied the mitigation and the team was monitoring the recovery.

Rough estimates suggest that the chatbot gets around 200 million active users everyday.