Users across the world found themselves locked out of OpenAI’s suite of artificial intelligence tools today, July 16, as a sweeping outage disrupted access to ChatGPT, Sora, and the GPT API (application programming interface), sets of rules and protocols that enable different software applications to communicate and exchange data with OpenAI’s systems.
According to The Times of India, the disruption began around 6.10 am IST, with users starting to report issues almost immediately. Data from DownDetector revealed the scale: roughly 88% of users flagged being entirely unable to use ChatGPT.
Others cited more specific hurdles; about 10% faced problems loading the website, while 9% struggled on the app. Many encountered blank chat windows, incomplete responses, or abrupt disconnections. A number of developers and creators also lost progress in live projects involving code generation or video work on tools like Codex and Sora.
Notably, this marks the second global disruption this month for the popular AI chatbot. While OpenAI swiftly acknowledged the trouble, updating its official status page, details on the cause remain sparse.
The company’s latest note simply reads, “We have identified elevated error rates and are working on a mitigation.” Users hoping for clarity on why this occurred, or when full functionality might return, will have to wait.
As highlighted by The Times of India, login failures were another widespread complaint, with verification loops preventing many from accessing their accounts altogether. For professionals depending on AI for coding tasks or content pipelines, today’s outage proved especially costly, forcing them to pause or restart critical work.
The scale of dependency on generative AI is evident in the spike of reports collected by DownDetector within minutes of the first failures. Until OpenAI issues a complete explanation, users worldwide are left grappling with interrupted workflows and waiting for services to resume normalcy.
