ChatGPT faced its second big outage in two days on February 4, 2026. OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot stopped working for many users across the world.
Outage tracker Down Detector showed over 24,000 complaints at the peak. This occurred one day after a similar issue on February 3 that affected over 28,000 users.
The repeated failures left users unable to use the tool and prompted many to switch to rivals such as Claude or Gemini. The issues raise serious questions about ChatGPT’s reliability as competition grows.
ChatGPT Down OutageL Rapid Surge in Complaints
Problems started early on February 4. Down Detector reports jumped fast. By 9:26 a.m. Pacific Time, over 4,000 users flagged issues. Minutes later, the number crossed 7,000, then 10,000, and hit 15,000 by 9:36 a.m.
It peaked at around 24,000 before dropping. Users reported being unable to load chats, send queries, upload images, or view chat history. Some got error 403 messages on profiles.
The hashtag #ChatGPTDown trended on X with users posting screenshots and complaints. The day before, on February 3, OpenAI reported high error rates for ChatGPT, the platform, and fine-tuning jobs.
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OpenAI Response and Growing Criticism
For a long time during the outage, OpenAI’s status page showed all systems as “fully operational.” This made users angry.
Later, the company updated the page. It said users faced “elevated errors” and the team was working on fixes. By 9:32 a.m. PST, OpenAI noted custom GPT updates were failing and said they applied a mitigation.
Recovery started soon after, with reports falling to about 4,200 by late morning. OpenAI has over 800 million weekly users but its market share dropped from 50% in 2023 to about 27% by end of 2025.
Rivals like Google Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude gain ground. CEO Sam Altman sent an internal “code red” memo to focus on ChatGPT strength.
These outages add pressure as users seek stable AI tools. Many in Mumbai and India turned to alternatives during the downtime.
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