ChatGPT experienced a major outage on Friday, September 25, 2026. More than 4,000 users reported problems on Downdetector that afternoon. The disruption also affected Codex, OpenAI's coding tool. OpenAI confirmed that users were experiencing elevated errors across services. This was not the first outage of the month for the platform.
The incident is significant because of ChatGPT's enormous scale. The platform now has over 900 million weekly active users worldwide. More than 9 million paying business users rely on it for work. OpenAI generates roughly two billion dollars in monthly revenue. If these services were unavailable for long, the financial impact would be severe.
September 2026 has been a particularly troubling month for AI reliability. Earlier, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok all went down at once. That simultaneous outage drew over 340,000 reports on Downdetector globally. Despite these incidents, OpenAI reported 99.63 percent uptime for September. However, even brief outages can disrupt critical business operations significantly.
The growing dependence on AI raises important strategic questions for businesses. If companies relied less on a single provider, risks would be reduced. Many organizations are now considering backup plans for AI tool failures. Experts suggest that businesses should diversify their technology partnerships. Building resilience into operations has become a key priority for leadership teams.
