Users of OpenAI’s popular chatbot tool, ChatGPT, experienced significant disruptions early on the morning of July 16. Many reported that the service was failing to upload chat history, taking unusually long to respond to commands, and even showing error messages such as “unable to load projects.”

According to Downdetector, which monitors global website outages, around 82% of users worldwide encountered some form of disruption, particularly with ChatGPT’s Record mode, Sora, and Codex services. The outage also affected many users across India and the UAE.

On its official status page, OpenAI acknowledged the issue, stating:
“We’re currently experiencing issues. Elevated Error Rates on ChatGPT Record mode, Sora, and Codex. We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services.”
The company added: “We are working on implementing a mitigation,” which suggests they are actively resolving the problem.

The outage was first detected around 5:50 AM IST, and a sharp spike in user-reported complaints was noted soon after. Most complaints involved loading errors, delayed responses, and issues accessing previous chat history or starting new chats.

For users, the best course of action is to wait as OpenAI works on restoring the service. Avoid repeatedly refreshing or submitting commands, which can overload the system further.

As the company continues to deploy fixes, users in India, UAE, and several other regions are advised to monitor the official OpenAI status page for real-time updates.

Stay tuned — OpenAI has assured that a fix is underway, and normal functionality should resume soon.