ChatGPT Outage December 2025: What Happened When ChatGPT Went Down Worldwide

Early Wednesday morning, a significant service interruption affected millions of users of the well-liked chatbot ChatGPT. The outage that started just before 6:30 AM Eastern Time prevented users from accessing the platform and created a feeling of panic over disappearing chat histories. OpenAI has now reported that all systems are completely back up and running, thanks to the fast correction work.

OpenAI's status page says that the outage of ChatGPT was initially caused because of the  problems that affected the creation of new Codex tasks. Codex is a critical infrastructure component that is responsible for  code generation and is an advanced reasoning feature of the whole platform.    

OpenAI's engineering teams acted quickly to the outage, changing the status to Monitoring at 6:29 AM after implementing an instant fix. The company made a complete resolution of the ChatGPT outage by 7:16 AM, asserting that the entire range of services affected had returned to full operation. This 45-minute interval of drastic service reduction clarifies the difficulties that businesses are facing when relying on cloud-based AI currently for their critical workflows.

ChatGPT Conversation History Missing During Outage

What got users particularly alarmed were the symptoms of the ChatGPT outage. Instead of the usual connection timeout errors, the disruption to the ChatGPT service appeared in the form of a "missing history" glitch, whereby the conversation sidebar showing prior chats and saved discussions would not load well.

This particular pattern of error is alarming, especially for power users who rely on ChatGPT as their single source of truth for code snippet repositories, creative writing drafts, and research documentation. During the outage of ChatGPT, social media platforms were filled with concerned users, stating that their whole conversation history seemed to have disappeared forever.

However, technical analysis assumes that this behavior was very much temporary and a result of failures on the backend side, rather than genuine permanent deletions of data. Quick incident resolution by OpenAI restored access and visibility to all the  important conversations of users.

ChatGPT Outage Impact on Developer Tools and Code Generation

The fact that the outage's main source was traced back to "Codex tasks" tells us that during the service interruption the features aimed at developers were the ones most heavily affected. As it is known, Codex serves as the big brain behind OpenAI's ability to convert human instructions into code; thus, it is a necessary function of the coding assistants and developer workflows that work automatically.

Thus, the outage of ChatGPT probably resulted in API-integrated developers for code generation, receiving silently failed or error responses from their applications. Tools and integrations not directly powered by Codex would already have been suffering or even stopped working due to the ChatGPT's performance drop or unavailability.

However, full restoration of the ChatGPT service has been achieved, but OpenAI still advises all users to refresh their browser sessions to make sure the functionality returns completely. Users that encounter problems with ChatGPT that seem to be caused by the system should, if necessary, clear cache and log out before signing back in order to gain normal access to the service again.

Key Takeaways from the ChatGPT Outage

The ChatGPT downtime incident highlights once again the necessary nature of AI services in today's enterprise operations and developer productivity. It is advisable for companies to consider the application of fallback procedures and backup systems for the workflows heavily reliant on ChatGPT in order to achieve minimal disruptions during the next service outages.

In light of this incident, if there are users who are concerned about their ChatGPT conversation history, they can be assured that regardless of the service's status, OpenAI's infrastructure is always protecting their data. Reload the page, go to the conversation sidebar, and wait for the complete syncing of the session to see your chat history come back.