OpenAI’s flagship AI service, ChatGPT, has suffered a major international disruption, leaving thousands of corporate and individual users in the US and hundreds in India unable to interact with the system in what marks its second significant service failure in just three days. The technical breakdown began at approximately 7:56 pm IST, triggering widespread system latency, frozen prompts and operational failures. The platform’s dedicated Work mode went completely unavailable for many accounts, hitting paying ChatGPT Plus subscribers particularly hard.“ChatGPT Work Mode is experiencing high error rates. We are investigating the issue,” the company said on OpenAI Status Page.
What impacted users are seeing
The disruption manifested across several core platform capabilities, with the main chatbot interface taking the brunt of the damage.Meanwhile, outage tracker Downdetector shows nearly 13,000 reports in the US with issues ranging from accusing ChatGPT platform (77%), Codex (10%) and app (7%). In India, more than 400 users report problems with ChatGPT, web browser and website.Some users say that the app/ website is not loading any result for prompt. Others claim that it loads for one prompt but abruptly closes results generation.
Second outage in 3 days and fifth in 7 days
On August 31, OpenAI acknowledged the incident via its official status dashboard, confirming that ChatGPT Plus members faced disruptions due to Work mode becoming inaccessible. The problems caused elevated latency and errors for ChatGPT Work users. The company said that affected users may be unable to start new tasks in ChatGPT Work.More than 2,000 users had reported problems with the platform as of 9:01 a.m. PT, according to Downdetector. The disruption reports poured in from the US, Mexico, Greece, the UK, Japan, India and Australia.On the same day, several Microsoft 365 services were also affected. Moreover, August 31st downtime follows an identical disruption that occurred on August 27, when OpenAI reported heightened error rates across ChatGPT Work and Workspace Agents on mobile and web clients.
