OpenAI addresses registration and login disruptions on ChatGPT.com

OpenAI confirmed on August 19 that registration and login services on ChatGPT.com went down, leaving users unable to access the world’s most popular AI chatbot. The company acknowledged the disruption on its official status page and said it was actively working to restore access. The outage hit both new signups and existing user logins, effectively locking out anyone who needed to authenticate. What went down and what stayed up The disruption appeared to be isolated to ChatGPT.com’s authentication layer. OpenAI’s API services continued running normally during the incident, posting 99.94% uptime over the May through August 2026 period. Codex, the company’s code-generation tool, was even steadier at 99.98% uptime. Active monitoring of the incident lasted at least 25 minutes, according to the company’s status updates. User reports on third-party aggregation platforms like StatusGator and IsDown showed a sharp spike in authentication failures during the same window, independently confirming the scope of the problem. ChatGPT’s overall component uptime stands at 99.67% from May through August 2026. That sounds impressive until you do the math: 0.33% downtime across roughly four months tr...