Searches for “ChatGPT down” rose after OpenAI recorded several service incidents on August 31. The company’s status history shows an issue affecting ChatGPT Work, followed later by elevated latency in the Responses API. OpenAI marked both incidents as recovered, so the record describes a past disruption rather than a confirmed outage at the time of this report.

The first entry said ChatGPT Work users were seeing elevated errors and latency. Workspaces can depend on ChatGPT for team conversations, shared projects and other daily tasks, so a service problem can affect more than a single chat window. OpenAI’s history lists the incident as fully recovered at 8:28 p.m. on August 31.

A separate entry recorded elevated latency in the Responses API. That API is used by software products that send requests to OpenAI models, which means the impact can appear as slow replies or failed application requests rather than as a blank ChatGPT page. The status history lists that incident at 10:27 p.m. and also shows it as recovered.

StatusGator recorded user reports during the same period and listed ChatGPT as operational when it checked the service. Its report is useful as a second view of the timing, but user reports are not a substitute for OpenAI’s incident record. The confirmed details here are the incidents and recovery statements published by OpenAI.

Anyone still seeing an error should check the official status page first. A local browser problem, an account issue or a separate application failure can look similar to a platform outage. Restarting the app may help with a stale session, but it cannot fix a service-side incident.

The August 31 record also shows why outage headlines need a time stamp. “ChatGPT down” may describe a short event that has already ended by the time a reader sees it. The reliable update is narrower: OpenAI acknowledged Work errors and Responses API latency, then reported recovery. New incidents should be checked against the live status page before users change their setup or move production traffic.