ChatGPT is experiencing a major outage and users are unable to log in, create accounts, or upload chats, including previous conversations. The outage began at approximately 8 pm ET on Wednesday, August 19, and is affecting users around the world, including those in the US and Europe. If affected, ChatGPT will get stuck loading animations for the sidebar and will not be able to send messages due to “too many simultaneous requests” errors. New registrations and logins on chatgpt.com are also failing. ChatGPT cannot load chats Source: BleepingComputer This outage also affects the OpenAI coding platform, Codex. Fortunately, OpenAI is aware of these issues and has already acknowledged them on the status page. OpenAI says it has identified that users are having login issues across all affected services and is “working to implement mitigation.” The outage also affects the OpenAI API, with up to 12 API endpoints listed as having issues on the company’s status page. Update 1: At 8:15 pm ET, OpenAI marked the incident as identified and still ongoing, approximately 14 minutes after it began. We continue to have problems in our tests. Overall prevention scores may obscure what happens after initial access. Once attackers use valid credentials, prevention drops dramatically. The 2026 Blue Report measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report
