How We Detect ChatGPT Outages

How IsChatGPTDown.chat detects ChatGPT outages: data sources, monitoring methodology, response-time calculation, uptime math, severity definitions, and independent disclosure.

How We Detect ChatGPT Outages

This page documents exactly how IsChatGPTDown.chat decides whether ChatGPT is operational, degraded, partially down, or fully down. Our goal is transparency — users, journalists, and developers relying on this site should be able to understand every status label they see.

1. Data Sources

We combine multiple independent signals into a single status answer:

  • Official OpenAI status — pulled from status.openai.com‘s public components JSON feed.
  • Independent HTTP probe — direct GET requests against chatgpt.com and chat.openai.com from our infrastructure, with TLS verification and redirect handling.
  • Scraped incident history — every incident listed on OpenAI’s public history page, parsed and stored with timestamps, severity, affected components, and resolution state.
  • User reports — aggregated signals from visitors reporting problems (rolling 15-minute window). Coming online in an upcoming release.
  • Regional probes — availability checks from multiple geographic regions. Coming online in an upcoming release.

2. Official OpenAI Status Monitoring

Every 5 minutes, our monitor fetches OpenAI’s public components feed and extracts the specific status of the ChatGPT component. Statuses returned by OpenAI are normalized into six standardized buckets: operational, degraded, partial, down, maintenance, and unknown.

3. Independent Server Checks

Separately, we perform direct HTTP probes against the ChatGPT web endpoints. A 2xx or 3xx response is treated as operational. A 401 or 403 is treated as operational (expected for an unauthenticated request). A 429 signals rate limiting and is flagged as degraded. 5xx responses and connection errors are flagged as down.

4. Regional Probes (coming soon)

We will expand to probes from the US East, US West, Europe, Middle East, Asia, and Australia. Each regional probe contributes an independent signal so that regional outages can be detected without requiring OpenAI to confirm them.

5. User Reports (coming soon)

Users will be able to report specific ChatGPT problems (login failures, slow responses, file uploads, voice mode, etc.) with one click. Reports are aggregated over a rolling 15-minute window and used to raise a partial-outage flag when the count spikes above the baseline.

6. Response-Time Calculation

Response time is measured client-side on each probe run: the time elapsed between the request going out and the full response body being received. We store every measurement and surface the average and peak over the displayed chart window (24 hours, 7 days, or 30 days).

7. Uptime Calculation

Uptime percentage is computed as: (checks_marked_operational / total_checks) × 100 over the requested window. A 99.95% uptime over 7 days therefore means 99.95% of individual 5-minute checks resolved as operational.

8. Incident Severity Definitions

  • Minor — user-reported or edge-case problem; the service remains broadly operational.
  • Degraded — service responds but slower than normal (latency above the 2000 ms threshold) or with increased error rates.
  • Partial outage — some features or regions fail while others continue to work.
  • Major outage / Down — service is broadly unreachable or OpenAI has officially declared a major outage.
  • Maintenance — planned downtime communicated in advance by OpenAI.

9. False-Positive Handling

A single failed probe does not trigger an outage. We require either an official OpenAI confirmation, three or more independent probe failures, or a user-report spike with high confidence before marking a major outage. Each probe carries a confidence weight — the engine combines them and emits a confidence level (low, medium, or high) alongside the status.

10. Data Limitations

Our monitoring has a bounded view of reality. A user experiencing local DNS issues, ISP routing problems, or account-specific throttling may see ChatGPT as down while our monitor reports operational. Conversely, our monitor may flag an outage a few minutes before the official OpenAI status page confirms it. These are expected tradeoffs of any external monitoring system.

11. Independent Disclosure

IsChatGPTDown.chat is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by OpenAI. All data on this site is collected independently. When we reference the official OpenAI status page, we link to it directly so visitors can verify.

Current Live Configuration

Check interval
Every 5 minutes
Official OpenAI status polling
Enabled
Independent HTTP probe
Enabled
Incident scrape
Every 30 minutes (last run: 2026-05-10 12:53:19)
Log retention
90 days
Degraded-latency threshold
2000 ms (response time above this is flagged as degraded)
Auto-refresh interval
30 seconds (homepage status card)

Last updated: this page reflects the live configuration of the monitoring system at render time.