Key keywords: ChatGPT outage, Codex service disruption, OpenAI service down, generative AI downtime, OpenAI API error, developer AI tool outage, OpenAI status update, AI service availability On Wednesday, May 22, 2024, thousands of users across North America, Europe, and parts of the Asia-Pacific region reported widespread access issues with OpenAI’s flagship products ChatGPT and Codex, marking one of the most notable service disruptions for the AI giant in the first half of the year. First reports of the outage surfaced at approximately 9:17 AM UTC on social media platforms including X (formerly Twitter), Reddit’s r/ChatGPT and r/Programming communities, where users shared screenshots of failed login attempts, infinite loading screens on the ChatGPT web interface, and 503 service unavailable errors for API requests tied to Codex. Unlike minor outages that have impacted only free-tier users in the past, this disruption affected a large share of paid ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Enterprise subscribers, as well as developers and businesses that integrate Codex into their workflows, including users of GitHub Copilot which runs on Codex’s underlying model. OpenAI first acknowledged the issue on its public status page 12 minutes after the first user reports, noting that its engineering teams were investigating an “unexpected anomaly with the authentication layer that handles access to both consumer-facing ChatGPT and developer-facing Codex API endpoints”. Initial updates from the company stated that roughly 30% of active users were unable to access the two services, with the highest concentration of impacted users located in the U.S. West Coast, EU, and Singapore. The disruption caused significant disruptions for a wide range of user groups. High school and college students relying on ChatGPT for research assistance, grammar checks, and study support reported being unable to access the tool ahead of final exam season and pending assignment deadlines. Software developers and engineering teams reported that Codex-powered code completion, bug fixing, and documentation generation tools stopped working mid-workflow, with many teams reporting 30% to 50% drops in productivity while the outage was ongoing. Small businesses and startups that build their core products on OpenAI’s Codex API also reported partial service outages for their own end users, leading to a wave of support tickets and user complaints across multiple industries. OpenAI rolled out a partial fix for the authentication issue at 10:42 AM UTC, with 80% of users regaining access to ChatGPT and Codex within 20 minutes of the fix being deployed. Full service restoration was confirmed at 11:48 AM UTC, roughly two and a half hours after the first outage reports were filed. In a post-incident update, OpenAI clarified that the outage was caused by a temporary service failure from a third-party identity verification provider, not a flaw in its core model hosting infrastructure. The company added that it would be adding redundant identity verification systems over the coming weeks to minimize the risk of similar outages in the future, and would be issuing service credits to eligible paid users affected by the disruption.