On the morning of August 8, 2025, thousands of users began asking on social media: “Is ChatGPT not working today?” Searches like “is ChatGPT down?”, “chatgpt is down”, and “why is chatgpt not working” surged by up to +4,450%, according to Google Trends. The outage occurred just one day after the highly anticipated launch of GPT-5, OpenAI’s most advanced model to date.

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Why did ChatGPT go down today?

According to OpenAI, the issue originated in the search functionality integrated into ChatGPT. The company confirmed on its official status page that it was investigating a search-related failure starting at 4:42 a.m. (Pacific Time), which directly affected users relying on this feature for real-time queries or web browsing integrations.

At 6:11 a.m., the company stated:

“We have identified the cause and are working on mitigating it.”

A few hours later, at 10:58 a.m., OpenAI updated the status indicating that mitigation was still being applied. Finally, at 11:54 a.m., they posted:

“We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery.”

Although service was partially restored, many users continued to report intermittent issues.

What did Downdetector report about ChatGPT?

The monitoring platform Downdetector registered an anomalous spike in failure reports around 11:00 a.m. In the graph, it’s clear that error notifications rose sharply, indicating that this was neither a minor nor isolated issue.

According to Downdetector itself: “We only report an incident when the number of problem notifications is significantly higher than the typical volume for that time of day.”

48% of the reports were related to ChatGPT, 30% to the application in general, and 22% to the website.

What OpenAI components were affected?

According to OpenAI’s official status page, the only directly affected component was ChatGPT, although it was not specified whether the interruption also impacted API models such as gpt-4o or the newly launched GPT-5.

The notice posted read: “Search is partially down for ChatGPT users.”

Although this was not a total system failure, the disruption was significant enough to cause concern among the global user community.

When will ChatGPT be back?

As of the time this article was published (12:30 p.m. Pacific Time), OpenAI remains in a “monitoring” state, meaning the system has been partially stabilized, but may still experience intermittent issues for some users.

The official message states: “We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery.”