ChatGPT API Status: Live Uptime, Latency, and Incident History

OpenAI API Status for Developers

The live status card above reflects the overall ChatGPT service. The API is a distinct component that can fail independently of the consumer-facing chatgpt.com product — we surface API-specific incidents below.

Is the API Actually Down, or Is It My Code?

Run these quick checks before debugging your own code:

1. Hit the models endpoint: curl https://api.openai.com/v1/models -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENAI_API_KEY" — a 200 response means auth and basic connectivity are fine.
2. Check your key on the OpenAI dashboard — revoked, expired, or rate-limited keys return 401 or 429.
3. Check your billing — a zero-balance account returns a specific error, not a generic 500.
4. Check your rate limits — burst traffic triggers 429 even on healthy infrastructure.
5. Try a different model — a model-specific rollout can produce 400 or 404 while others work.

Common API Error Codes

• 401 Unauthorized — invalid or revoked API key.
• 429 Too Many Requests — rate limit exceeded. Back off with exponential delay.
• 500 Internal Server Error — OpenAI infrastructure issue. Retry with backoff; if it persists check the live status above.
• 502 / 503 / 504 — upstream gateway issue, usually transient. Retry after 30–90 seconds.
• 400 Bad Request — your payload is malformed; not an outage.

Incidents That Affect Only the API

API-only outages happen more often than public-facing ones. The API shares infrastructure but is billed and rate-limited separately, and internal rollouts are sometimes staged with API traffic first.

Response Latency and Your Code

Normal API latency ranges from 200 ms to 2 s for simple completions. Streaming responses start faster but total time depends on output length. The live response-time chart on our homepage shows independent HTTP probe timings for comparison — if your own requests take drastically longer, the bottleneck is likely on your side (network, DNS, client library buffering).

Frequently Asked Questions