ChatGPT Outage Today: What Happened & How OpenAI Is Fixing It

ChatGPT Outage (10 June 2025): What Happened, Why It Matters, and How OpenAI Is Responding

TL;DR — Starting about 3 p.m. IST / 05:30 a.m. ET on 10 June 2025, ChatGPT and the OpenAI API began returning elevated error rates worldwide. OpenAI acknowledged the disruption within minutes, has been posting live updates on its [status page] and is gradually restoring service. No data-loss or security breach has been reported so far. Below is a clear, step-by-step rundown of the incident, its impact, and practical tips while you wait for full recovery.

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1. Quick Timeline

(Times converted from UTC to IST for clarity.)

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2. What Users Are Seeing

• Web & Mobile ChatGPT – blank responses, “Something went wrong,” 500/502 errors.

• OpenAI API – HTTP 5xx with latency spikes up to 40 s.

• Playground & Embedded Tools – intermittent time-outs.

• No evidence of account compromise; login still works but requests may fail.

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3. Likely Cause (Early Signals)

OpenAI hasn’t published a post-mortem yet, but engineers mention “backend component instability under heavy load.” A similar March 2025 incident traced problems to a Cosmos DB failure plus web-service pods crash-looping, starving the fleet of healthy instances status.openai.com. Today’s outage shows the same symptoms—high latency, pod health-check failures, traffic throttling—suggesting a comparable underlying pattern.

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4. What OpenAI Is Doing Right Now

1. Traffic Shedding & Auto-Scaling – unhealthy pods are being drained while fresh replicas spin up.

2. Read-Only Mode for Some Paths – to protect data integrity during recovery.

3. Live Status Updates – every 20–30 min on status.openai.com with component-level granularity status.openai.com.

4. Post-Incident RCA – a full root-cause analysis (RCA) will be published once service is stable (typically within 72 h).

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5. How This Affects You

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6. Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. Is my chat history safe?
Yes. Outages of this type affect availability, not the underlying data store. OpenAI confirms no customer data loss. status.openai.com

Q2. Could this be a cyber-attack?
There’s no evidence so far. Error patterns match internal service degradation, not a DDoS or intrusion.

Q3. How can I tell when it’s back?
Subscribe to email/web-push on the status page or follow @OpenAI on X. Green “Operational” icons across ChatGPT and APIs mean full recovery.

Q4. Does this impact other OpenAI products (Sora, DALL-E)?
Yes, anything routed through the same auth & inference layers may show higher latency, though Vision and Sora report fewer errors. indiatimes.com

Q5. Will I get credit refunds?
Historically, OpenAI credits accounts when SLA thresholds are breached once the monthly uptime calculation is finalised. Watch your billing dashboard.

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7. Best Practices for the Next Outage

1. Build graceful-degradation paths (e.g., fallback answers, cached embeddings).

2. Monitor status.openai.com programmatically—poll JSON feed and auto-switch modes.

3. Set sensible user messaging: “AI assistant is temporarily unavailable — trying again shortly.”

4. Log & alert on latency spikes to see problems before users tweet about them.

5. Keep multiple models (open-source LLMs, Azure OpenAI mirror) ready for hot-swap.

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8. Outlook

Outages—though disruptive—are part of any large-scale cloud service. Each incident usually yields infra hardening and playbook tweaks. Expect a detailed RCA and remediation plan from OpenAI within a few days, plus incremental improvements to prevent similar cascading pod failures.