ChatGPT is down for many users as of 3:35 p.m. UTC on Monday, April 20, 2026. OpenAI confirmed on its status page that it is investigating issues affecting ChatGPT and its Codex API service. The company has not said what caused the outage or when service will return.
If ChatGPT is not loading for you, it is not your device or connection. The platform is experiencing a widespread outage.
What Users Are Seeing
Users trying to open ChatGPT in the app or web browser see this message: "There is a problem with your request. (9ef50c806bc745a1-LHR)."
When users try to send a message, they get: "Hmm... something seems to have gone wrong."
The error code includes "LHR," the airport code for London Heathrow, which suggests the issue may involve geographic routing or content delivery network problems. OpenAI has not confirmed this.
What OpenAI Said
OpenAI posted an outage notice at 3:35 p.m. UTC. The status page says the company is "investigating the issue for the listed services." No updates have been posted since.
OpenAI marked 12 ChatGPT components as affected and one Codex component. No other OpenAI services are listed as down.
"Investigating" means OpenAI knows there is a problem but has not found the cause. "Degraded performance" means the service is partially or fully unavailable.
Earlier Problems Today
This is the second incident OpenAI reported Monday. Users had problems with ChatGPT Business accounts earlier after upgrading or adding seats. OpenAI fixed that at 10:43 a.m. UTC. The company started investigating at 8:13 a.m. UTC, roughly five hours before the current outage.
OpenAI has not said if the two incidents are related.
What Happens Next
OpenAI has not given a timeline for recovery. You cannot fix this yourself. The problem is on OpenAI's servers, not your end.
OpenAI's status page at status.openai.com will show updates when service returns. Past ChatGPT outages have lasted one to four hours, though some have gone longer.
The company has not said how many users are affected or which regions are hit hardest.
Damilare Odedina
