OpenAI confirms ChatGPT is down as logins and signups fail
OpenAI's ChatGPT experiences major outage affecting logins, signups, and API access.
Summary
OpenAI's ChatGPT service is currently suffering a major outage, preventing users worldwide from logging in, signing up for new accounts, and accessing their previous conversations. The issue, which began around 8 PM ET on August 19, 2026, also impacts the OpenAI API and the Codex coding platform. OpenAI has acknowledged the problem and is working on a mitigation.
Full text
OpenAI confirms ChatGPT is down as logins and signups fail By Mayank Parmar August 19, 2026 08:20 PM 0 ChatGPT is experiencing a major outage, and users are unable to sign in, create accounts, or load chats, including previous conversations. The outage started at approximately 8 PM ET on Wednesday, August 19, and is affecting users worldwide, including those in the US and Europe. If you are affected, ChatGPT will get stuck at loading animations for the sidebar, and you won't be able to send messages due to "too many concurrent requests" errors. New signups and logins on chatgpt.com are also failing. ChatGPT is unable to load chats Source: BleepingComputer This outage also affects OpenAI's coding platform, Codex. Thankfully, OpenAI is aware of these issues and has already acknowledged them on the status page. OpenAI says it has identified that users are running into login issues across the impacted services, and that it is "working on implementing a mitigation." The outage also affects the OpenAI API, with as many as 12 API endpoints listed as having issues on the company's status page. Update 1: As of 8:15 PM ET, OpenAI has marked the incident as identified and still ongoing, roughly 14 minutes after it began. We continue to run into issues in our tests. Once attackers have valid credentials, only 37% of their actions are blocked Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report Related Articles: Get access to ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini for just $69.97 todayGet 6 Claude & ChatGPT project management courses for just $20ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and DeepSeek in one app for $39.99OpenAI releases ChatGPT 5.6 Cyber, but it's only for approved usersOpenAI rolls out a major ChatGPT upgrade, even if you don’t pay for it