TLDR: OpenAI’s ChatGPT experienced a widespread global outage on Wednesday, July 16, 2025, with thousands of users reporting an ‘Unusual Activity Detected’ error and inability to access chat history. The disruption affected core chatbot functionality, its website, and mobile applications. OpenAI acknowledged the issues, identified the root cause, and successfully restored services by 9:24 AM IST, promising a detailed root cause analysis.
OpenAI’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, faced significant global disruptions on Wednesday, July 16, 2025, impacting thousands of users worldwide. Reports flooded in on platforms like DownDetector, indicating a widespread inability to access the AI service. Over 3,400 users in the United States alone reported issues by Tuesday afternoon local time, with the outage escalating by 8:00 AM IST on Wednesday.
Users attempting to engage with the chatbot were met with frustrating messages such as ‘unusual error detected’ and found themselves unable to load their chat history, severely disrupting workflows and daily tasks for many reliant on the AI tool. The outage primarily affected the chatbot’s core functionality, accounting for 82% of reported issues, while 12% concerned the website and 6% impacted the mobile application. Social media platforms were inundated with complaints from affected users, alongside a wave of humorous memes reflecting the situation.
OpenAI quickly acknowledged the disruption on its official status page, stating, ‘We’re currently experiencing issues. Elevated Error Rates on ChatGPT record mode, Sora and Codex. We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services.’ The company confirmed that the problem extended across 23 different components, including essential functions like login, search, conversations, GPTs, and file uploads, as well as advanced tools such as DALL-E, GPT Vision, advanced data analysis, image generation, voice mode, and memory features. Services tied to ChatGPT’s broader ecosystem, including Sora, Codex, context connectors, 1-800-CHAT-GPT, and desktop applications for macOS and Windows, were also affected.
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OpenAI engineers actively worked to resolve the problem, and by 9:24 AM IST, the company reported that all affected services had fully recovered, with the platform resuming normal functionality across all devices and services. OpenAI has also committed to sharing a detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) within five business days to provide a comprehensive explanation of the outage’s nature.
