ChatGPT experienced a stretch of elevated error rates on December 2, 2025, leaving many users unable to get responses across both the mobile app and the web. The disruption lasted roughly 30 minutes, and while it wasn’t one of the platform’s longest outages, it was widespread enough to trigger reports across Down Detector and prompt a quick acknowledgment from OpenAI.
According to OpenAI’s status page, the issue surfaced shortly after 2:40 PM ET, when the company confirmed that “users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services.” During that window, queries simply stalled: on mobile, users saw the glowing loading circle indefinitely, and on desktop, requests failed to produce any output. Within the company, teams moved quickly to diagnose the problem before pushing a mitigation update at 3:12 PM ET. By then, early signs of recovery were already visible; some users reported that ChatGPT had begun responding again even before the official recovery note was posted.
Down Detector reports peaked at over 3,400 around the moment OpenAI confirmed the issue, then dropped steadily as the fix propagated. The outage didn’t come with an explanation — OpenAI rarely offers granular technical details for short-lived service interruptions — but it followed a familiar pattern: confirmation, mitigation, and a period of monitoring before the status page returned to fully operational.
For anyone who still encountered hiccups late in the recovery, standard troubleshooting advice applied: refresh the browser, close and reopen the ChatGPT app, or start a new conversation thread. These steps typically clear cached sessions that may not reconnect immediately after service is restored.
Given the scale ChatGPT operates at, brief disruptions aren’t unusual, but this one stood out because of how abruptly it interrupted normal use and how quickly reports spiked across social platforms. Still, OpenAI’s rapid response helped keep it contained. By around 3:30 PM ET, most active users were back to asking questions, generating content, and generally using the system without noticeable lag.
