OpenAI’s ChatGPT and related products, including the GPT API, Sora and Codex, were hit by a worldwide service interruption that began in the early hours of 16 July. Monitoring site Downdetector logged about 3,400 problem reports in the United States alone, while Indian media said 91 per cent of complaints concerned the flagship chatbot. Users said they were unable to log in, saw "unusual activity detected" warnings or lost ongoing conversations. Developers also reported delayed API calls and repeated verification loops. OpenAI confirmed the disruption on its status page, citing “elevated error rates” and “degraded performance” across several services. The company said it had identified the issue and was “working on a mitigation,” but did not give a timeline for full recovery. The incident is the second sizable outage in about a month, adding to concerns among businesses and developers that rely on the tools for customer support, coding assistance and content generation.