How to Get Updates About OpenAI Service Incidents

Go to status.openai.com and use Subscribe to updates to receive incident notifications, then check the current status banner and the affected component list to see whether an issue touches the product you use. For past incidents and uptime trends, open View history. The page reports availability in aggregate across all tiers, models, and error types, so your own experience can differ depending on your subscription tier and the specific features you use.

Check the current status first

The page opens with a plain-language banner. When everything is healthy it reads "We're fully operational" with a note that no issues affecting the systems are known. When something is wrong, this banner is where the incident summary appears.

Below the banner, the System status section lists each product area with its component count and uptime percentage. The page groups components under these headings:

Within each group, individual components carry their own figures. For example, under APIs, Chat Completions, Responses, Agents, Decisions, Fine-tuning, Embeddings, Batch, Audio, Moderations, Realtime, and Files each show 100% in the sample, while Images shows 99.990% and Login 99.98%. Under ChatGPT, Conversations is 99.95%, Login 99.93%, ChatGPT Work 99.90%, and Codex in ChatGPT Desktop 99.91%, with several components at 99.998%.

How to use this: find the component that matches what you are doing — Chat Completions for API calls, Conversations for chat sessions, Codex Web or CLI for coding tools, Login if you cannot sign in — and read its status and uptime rather than relying only on the top-level banner.

Subscribe to updates

The Subscribe to updates option on the page is the intended way to be notified about incidents rather than refreshing manually. Use it if you want incident and recovery notices pushed to you; the page presents it as the subscription entry point for status updates.

A practical routine:

1. Open status.openai.com when a request fails or a feature misbehaves.
2. Read the banner for an active incident summary.
3. Locate your specific component in the System status list.
4. Subscribe to updates so future incidents reach you without a manual check.
5. If the banner says operational but you still see errors, treat it as a possible account-, tier-, or feature-specific problem rather than a platform-wide outage.

Review history for past incidents and uptime

View history opens the record of past incidents and the uptime figures behind the percentages. Use it to answer questions like "was this outage already reported?" or "has this component been flaky this month?" The sample period on the page runs Jul 2026 – Oct 2026, and the uptime numbers shown are calculated over that window.

Uptime percentages are a quick signal, not a guarantee. A component at 99.998% can still have had a brief blip; a component at 99.70% (the ChatGPT group figure) has had more accumulated downtime than the API group at 99.97%.

Why your experience may not match the page

The page states that availability metrics are reported at an aggregate level across all tiers, models, and error types, and that individual customer availability may vary depending on subscription tier and the specific model and API features in use. Two consequences:

• A component can show high uptime while a particular model or feature you rely on had a rough patch.
• An incident affecting one tier may not appear as a broad outage.

So use the page to confirm whether a known incident exists, and use the component-level figures to narrow down where the problem sits. If both look clean and your errors persist, the issue is likely specific to your account, key, or configuration rather than the platform status.