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OpenAI traced the September 29, 2026 errors affecting ChatGPT, Codex, and API services—including the Agents API—to an internal feature rollout that triggered repeated checks and exhausted shared network connection capacity. The company said it mitigated most customer-facing impact in about 30 minutes, while residual degradation continued until later that day. Its incident record was marked resolved on October 6, with all affected services reported recovered.
What happened on September 29?
OpenAI’s incident record describes elevated errors across ChatGPT, Codex, and the API, including the Agents API. The company’s root-cause write-up says some users encountered failed requests, timeouts, or difficulty signing in to ChatGPT and Codex. Some API requests failed, including Agents API requests, and some conversations or tasks could not start, resume, or complete successfully.
The incident page lists affected components across these services, including Chat Completions, Responses, Agents, Fine-tuning, Embeddings, Images, Batch, Audio, Moderations, Realtime, Files, and Login for the API; Conversations, Login, ChatGPT Work, Codex in ChatGPT Desktop, Compliance API, Search, File uploads, Voice mode, GPTs, Image Generation, Deep Research, Agent, Sites, and Connectors/Apps for ChatGPT; and Codex Web, Codex API, CLI, and VS Code extension for Codex. These are components named on the incident page, not proof that every listed feature—or every user—was affected.
OpenAI cautions on its status page: “Availability metrics are reported at an aggregate level across all tiers, models and error types. Individual customer availability may vary depending on their subscription tier as well as the specific model and API features in use.”
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What caused the errors?
OpenAI attributed the incident to a feature rollout that changed how routine settings requests were handled. According to the company, those requests began triggering repeated background checks across internal services. The checks opened new connections across services; when checks failed, they generated additional attempts. That activity exhausted shared network connection capacity, leaving otherwise healthy services unable to communicate reliably.
The account describes an internal service-side reliability problem. It does not identify a specific vendor, network device, or affected user group, and it does not attribute the cause to customers’ devices, routers, or accounts.
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How long did the incident last?
The timeline has three distinct milestones. OpenAI’s root-cause write-up says most customer-facing impact was mitigated within approximately 30 minutes, at about 11:00 a.m. PDT on September 29, 2026. It says residual degradation continued until approximately 4:07 p.m. PDT that day. The incident record’s final resolved update is timestamped October 6, 2026, at 08:26 AM and states that all affected services had recovered.
The October 6 entry is the timestamp of the incident page’s resolved update; it does not mean the reported customer impact continued until that date. OpenAI did not publish an outage percentage, affected-customer count, or measured post-incident reliability outcome in these materials.
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During the incident, OpenAI says engineers disabled the rollout, routed traffic around unhealthy infrastructure, reduced repeated requests, and increased database cache capacity. The company also says it disabled the triggering feature, removed the code that initiated repeated checks during settings requests, and deployed a fix for expensive database queries.
OpenAI said it was expanding network capacity and reviewing other queries to reduce recovery bottlenecks. Those were ongoing efforts in the write-up, rather than completed fixes. The published account does not quantify their effect on reliability.
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What should you do if you are still seeing ChatGPT errors?
First check OpenAI’s status page for a known or ongoing incident. The company’s troubleshooting guide addresses messages such as “Something went wrong,” “A network error occurred,” and “There was an error generating a response.” It recommends general steps based on the error, including:
- Refresh the page or start a new chat.
- Try an incognito or private browsing window, or another browser.
- Temporarily disable browser extensions or VPN, proxy, or security filters.
- Try another network or device.
These are general troubleshooting suggestions, not remedies for the internal capacity issue OpenAI described for September 29. If the status page shows a service incident, local changes may not resolve it.
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