If you’re asking “is ChatGPT down right now”, the answer is yes — for many users across the U.S. today, access to ChatGPT is either interrupted or unreliable. As of November 18, 2025, major disruptions have been confirmed affecting ChatGPT and several other platforms.
Table of Contents
What Happened?
- At approximately 6:40 a.m. ET (≈ 3:40 a.m. PT), a significant outage began affecting web infrastructure provider Cloudflare, which handles a large portion of global internet traffic. The issue triggered access failures for many services, including ChatGPT.
- Cloudflare described the root cause as a “spike in unusual traffic” which in turn caused widespread routing errors and “500 Internal Server Error” responses across its network.
- The outage reports peaked at thousands of user-submissions to monitoring sites and have since started to decline, but intermittent issues remain.
- On the official status page of ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI, the incident is logged under “Partial outage.” The root cause is confirmed as a “third-party service provider issue.”
- Current service level: Some users can still access ChatGPT, but many are reporting errors or severe latency; service is not universally restored yet.
Current Status for U.S. Users
- Many U.S. users find ChatGPT loading but returning errors or failing to generate responses.
- Some users are locked out completely.
- The outage is uneven — some regions, accounts or tiers (free vs paid) may be impacted differently.
- OpenAI is actively monitoring and working on resolution; Cloudflare has implemented a fix and is tracking recovery metrics.
- Because the root cause involves a large-scale infrastructure provider, full restoration may take additional time even after an official “all clear”.
Timeline of Events
| Time (ET) | Event |
|---|---|
| ≈ 6:20–6:40 a.m. | Cloudflare detects unusual traffic spike; service routing begins to fail. |
| Morning (U.S.) | Reports begin rising for ChatGPT, X (formerly Twitter), and other services. |
| Mid-morning | OpenAI posts incident status showing “Partial outage” for ChatGPT & APIs. |
| Late morning | Cloudflare notes some recovery underway; error rates still elevated. |
| Afternoon (ongoing) | Services slowly restoring; users still experiencing issues. |
What You Can Do Right Now
- Refresh your browser or the ChatGPT app; sometimes the issue is local to your session being routed through impacted infrastructure.
- Check the status page of OpenAI (if accessible) to confirm current incident state.
- If access is mission-critical, consider temporarily using an alternative tool until ChatGPT stabilises.
- Avoid assuming the service is fully back until confirmed — some functions may partially work but still suffer degraded performance.
- If you’re using ChatGPT for commercial or enterprise workflows, consider contingency planning given the dependency on external infrastructure.
Why It Matters
- ChatGPT is one of the most widely used AI chatbots in the U.S., and when it’s down, businesses, students and individuals lose access to writing help, research, automation and conversation tools.
- The cause being an infrastructure provider (Cloudflare) underscores how many internet services share common dependencies — a single point of failure can ripple widely.
- For professional users relying on ChatGPT’s uptime, interruptions like this highlight the importance of fallback options.
In summary: Yes — ChatGPT is currently facing service disruptions in the U.S. and globally. The issue stems from a major provider outage (Cloudflare) and is being addressed, but full normalisation will take time. If you’re having trouble accessing ChatGPT right now, you’re not alone — and you might want to pause tasks depending on it until stability returns.
Let us know in the comments how ChatGPT is working for you right now — still down or back to normal? Stay tuned for updates.
