What to do when ChatGPT is down

By Joe Balewski · July 13, 2026

ChatGPT goes down more often than you'd think — usually briefly, occasionally for hours. Here's what actually helps, in order.

1. Confirm it's them, not you

Check our live ChatGPT status page. It reads OpenAI's official status feed every 75 seconds and answers in plain English. If it says ChatGPT is having problems, you're done diagnosing — nothing on your end is broken, and nothing on your end can fix it.

2. Skip the troubleshooting rituals

When ChatGPT is down, clearing your cache, restarting your router, and logging out and back in do nothing except burn ten minutes. Their servers are the problem. Save the ritual for when the status page says everything's fine but it's still broken for you — that's the rare case where it might actually be on your end (see our guide to telling the difference).

3. Switch tools — your work doesn't have to stop

The AI services almost never go down together. When ChatGPT is out, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot are usually fine — our pages show their live status too. All three are free to try and none needs a new skill to use: you type, it answers.

One thing to know: your conversation doesn't transfer. If you were deep into something, paste the important context into the new tool — a sentence or two about what you were doing and where you left off is usually enough.

4. If you'd rather wait it out

Most incidents resolve within the hour; the long ones are rare. Follow @aidowntoday and turn on notifications — we post when it breaks and when it's back, so you don't have to sit there refreshing.

5. When it comes back

Just reload. Your chat history is almost always intact — outages interrupt service, they don't usually delete anything. If a response was cut off mid-answer, ask it to continue; you won't need to start over.