ChatGPT and Codex Fall Over in Broad Thursday Outage
OpenAI's status page lists 15 broken components, from login to Voice mode, as engineers hunt the cause.
Key points
- OpenAI's ChatGPT and Codex services started failing at roughly 10:58 AM Eastern on Thursday, September 3.
- At least 15 ChatGPT components are affected, including login, conversations, file uploads, Voice mode, image generation and the Agent feature.
- OpenAI has acknowledged the outage on its status page and says it is still investigating.
- The company has not named a cause, and there is no evidence tying the outage to the upcoming Astra model launch.
ChatGPT is broken for a lot of people right now.
OpenAI's chatbot and its Codex coding assistant started throwing errors at around 10:58 AM Eastern on Thursday, September 3, and hours later engineers were still hunting the cause. If you tried to open a conversation, sign in, upload a file, use Voice mode, or run an image generation, you likely saw a failure.
OpenAI has acknowledged the problem on its public status page. "We are investigating the issue for the listed services," the company said. As of writing, it has not disclosed what triggered the outage.
What is actually broken?
Almost everything a normal user touches. OpenAI's status page lists 15 affected ChatGPT components, which is unusually broad for a single incident.
The affected pieces include Conversations, Login, ChatGPT Work (the business tier), Codex inside the ChatGPT desktop app, the Compliance API used by enterprise customers, Search, file uploads, Voice mode, custom GPTs, image generation, Deep Research, the Agent feature that carries out multi-step tasks for users, ChatGPT Atlas, Sites, and Connectors/Apps.
Codex, OpenAI's coding assistant used by developers to write and review software, is also down.
| Component | Status |
|---|---|
| Conversations, Login, Search | Degraded |
| Voice mode, image generation, file uploads | Degraded |
| Deep Research, Agent, GPTs | Degraded |
| Codex (in ChatGPT Desktop) | Degraded |
| ChatGPT Work, Compliance API, Connectors | Degraded |
Should ordinary users worry about their data?
No evidence points that way. This looks like an availability problem, meaning the service is failing to respond, not a security breach where an outsider steals information. OpenAI has described it only as "elevated errors" and has not mentioned any data exposure.
That said, if you were mid-conversation when the outage hit, unsaved context inside a session may be lost. Standard advice applies: do not paste sensitive company data, customer records, or passwords into any chatbot, outage or not.
Is this connected to the Astra launch?
Probably too early to say. OpenAI has confirmed a new flagship model, called Astra, is coming soon. Big model rollouts often involve serving-infrastructure changes, and infrastructure changes are a common cause of outages.
But OpenAI has not said the two are connected, and there is no public evidence linking them. Treat the timing as coincidence until the company publishes a post-incident writeup.
What businesses that rely on it should do now
If your workflow depends on ChatGPT or Codex, assume degraded service for the rest of the working day and plan a manual fallback. Enterprise customers using the Compliance API (which lets regulated firms log and audit ChatGPT usage) should note that audit pipelines may have gaps for the outage window and check retention once the service recovers.
Developers piping Codex into their editors should have a local model or a cached suggestion path ready. Betting a production pipeline on a single external AI vendor with no offline mode is a design choice, and days like this are the bill.
As first reported by BleepingComputer, OpenAI is still working the problem. We will update once the company posts a root cause.
