ChatGPT outage on April 20

ChatGPT suffered a broad outage on Monday, April 20, leaving many users unable to load the service as OpenAI investigated the disruption. (gvwire.com) User reports climbed quickly on Downdetector, passing 2,000 by 7:41 a.m. Pacific time, 2,700 by 7:52 a.m., nearly 4,000 by 8:01 a.m., and more than 5,000 by 8:14 a.m. Pacific time. (gvwire.com) Downdetector’s U.S. tracker listed OpenAI with “possible problems,” and 85% of the reports it displayed were tied to ChatGPT rather than the app or login. (downdetector.com) OpenAI’s public status page showed no active incident by Tuesday, April 21, but coverage on April 20 said the company had marked ChatGPT and Codex as affected while it investigated. (status.openai.com) (gvwire.com) The outage hit a tool that many offices now use for drafting, coding, search, and customer support, which meant a consumer app failure also disrupted work software and internal workflows. (downdetector.com) (tomsguide.com) Tom’s Guide described the outage as a “massive” disruption and said work slowed as users waited for ChatGPT to come back, underscoring how quickly a single service interruption can ripple across desks and teams. (tomsguide.com) The April 20 incident also landed in a year when OpenAI’s status history has already logged multiple partial outages and degraded-performance events affecting ChatGPT or Codex, including incidents in February and March. (status.openai.com 1) (status.openai.com 2) By Tuesday, the immediate problem had cleared from OpenAI’s status page, but the outage left the same practical lesson as earlier disruptions: if ChatGPT is part of the workflow, teams need a backup for the hours when it is not. (status.openai.com)