ChatGPT Outage Report — April 20, 2026
Title: ChatGPT was down — Live updates on the massive AI outage
Authors: Dave LeClair with contributions from Scott Younker
Publication Date: Last updated April 20, 2026
Source: Tom’s Guide
Outage Details
The incident began around 10:05 a.m. ET on April 20, 2026. At its peak, over 13,000 Down Detector reports were recorded, indicating a significant global problem on OpenAI’s end.
Down Detector recorded approximately 2,000 reports at peak impact in some sources, with users experiencing difficulty accessing projects and some reporting lost work. The discrepancy in peak numbers reflects different measurement windows during the outage.
Services Affected
The outage impacted a wide range of OpenAI services:
- ChatGPT conversations
- User logins
- Voice mode
- Image generation
- Codex
- API Platform
Users in the UK, United States, and India were among those most affected. According to user reports:
- 63% could not access old conversations
- 27% could not sign in
OpenAI’s Response
OpenAI upgraded the status from “degraded performance” to “partial outage” on its status page. The company confirmed: “We are investigating the issue for the listed services. Impacted users are currently unable to access ChatGPT, Codex and API Platform.”
Timeline of Events
- 10:05 a.m. ET: Outage began
- ~1 p.m. ET: Mitigation measures applied by OpenAI
- 12:51 PM ET: OpenAI reported a fix was implemented and being monitored
- ~1:30 p.m. ET: Issue reportedly resolved for most users
- Late afternoon: Situation largely normalized
OpenAI downgraded the status to “partial outage” and noted they were “monitoring the recovery.” The company maintained slow communication throughout the incident, which drew additional criticism from users.
Context
This outage is particularly notable given Anthropic’s announcement the same day of expanded infrastructure with Amazon, partly motivated by similar strain on its own systems. Anthropic’s announcement noted “inevitable strain” on infrastructure due to sharp rises in consumer usage.