Outage recap · OpenAI

ChatGPT outage — October 26, 2026

On October 26, 2026, ChatGPT had a reported incident on OpenAI's official status page. Below is what was reported — impact, timing, and the AI services the same upstream outage could affect.

Elevated error rates for Ads POST requests

minor
Started
Oct 26, 2:19 PM EDT
Resolved
Oct 26, 2:30 PM EDT
Duration
11 min

OpenAI's updates (3)

  1. identified · Oct 26, 2:19 PM EDT

    We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for POST /ads/* endpoints. We are working on implementing a mitigation.

  2. monitoring · Oct 26, 2:25 PM EDT

    We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery.

  3. resolved · Oct 26, 2:30 PM EDT

    All impacted services have now fully recovered.

What our checks recorded

We checked ChatGPT 2 times from OpenAI's start time to its resolution, once every five minutes. Every one of them reached ChatGPT's site, so this incident did not show up as a failed page load. Our check loads the public site; it cannot see an API error or a broken feature. Median response time was 272 ms, against 282 ms over the 24 hours before. OpenAI posted the incident at Oct 26, 2:19 PM EDT.

Updates are OpenAI's own words from its status page (status: resolved); we never add an inferred cause.

The AI cascade

ChatGPT depends on OpenAI. When that upstream has an incident, it doesn't hit ChatGPT alone — these AI tools share the dependency and can degrade at the same time:

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AIDownCheck is not affiliated with OpenAI. This recap summarizes incidents published on OpenAI's official status page.