How We Detect ChatGPT Outages

How IsChatGPTDown.chat detects ChatGPT outages: data sources, monitoring methodology, connectivity-latency 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 independent signals into a single status answer:

  • Official OpenAI status — pulled from the status.openai.com Statuspage v2 JSON API (components feed). We evaluate the components that make up the consumer ChatGPT product separately from developer/API components.
  • Independent reachability probe — direct GET requests against chatgpt.com and chat.openai.com from our infrastructure, with TLS verification and redirect handling. This proves connectivity, not that authenticated conversations succeed.
  • Official incident history — every incident from OpenAI’s official incidents.json API, stored by its stable official incident id with clean name, timestamps, severity, and the full official update timeline.
  • User reports — aggregated one-click reports from visitors over a rolling 15-minute window, used only as a supporting signal.
  • Regional probes — not currently deployed. Until real regional probes exist, regional availability is shown as “Unavailable” and does not raise our confidence.

2. Polling Interval & Freshness

By default the monitor runs every 5 minutes. Each result is stored with the exact time it was taken. We apply strict freshness rules:

  • Fresh — within one monitoring interval plus a short grace period.
  • Delayed — beyond the grace period; confidence is capped at medium.
  • Stale/unavailable — roughly two missed cycles (at least 10 minutes) old. Stale data is never shown as operational, and we display a clear “live monitoring data is temporarily unavailable” state instead.

3. Component Mapping (Consumer ChatGPT vs API)

OpenAI’s status feed lists many components. We map them to the consumer ChatGPT product (conversations, GPTs, voice mode, login, file uploads, search, image generation, etc.) or to developer/API services (Responses, Chat Completions, Embeddings, Fine-tuning, Batch, Codex API, etc.). An API-only incident never marks consumer ChatGPT as down, and API-only incidents do not appear under “ChatGPT Active Outages”.

4. Independent Reachability Check

We perform direct HTTP probes against the ChatGPT web endpoints. A 2xx/3xx response indicates reachability. A 401/403 for an anonymous request means the host is reachable but challenged — this confirms connectivity only, not that signed-in conversations work. A 429 is flagged as degraded; 5xx and connection errors are flagged as down.

5. Confidence Rules

  • High — multiple fresh independent signals agree.
  • Medium — signals are fresh but incomplete or mildly inconsistent, or data is only slightly delayed.
  • Low — only one fresh source is available.
  • Unavailable — required signals are stale.

6. Connectivity-Latency Calculation

On each probe run we measure connectivity latency — the time between the request going out and the response arriving from chatgpt.com. This measures network reachability, not the time required for ChatGPT to generate a response. We store every measurement and surface the average and peak over the displayed chart window. When the latest data is stale we do not present an old latency value as current.

7. Uptime Calculation & Missing Data

Uptime is computed as (operational_samples / total_samples) × 100 over the requested window, using only samples that were actually recorded. We store the numerator, denominator, and coverage percentage. Missing monitoring intervals are never counted as uptime. If a window does not have enough coverage, we show “Insufficient data” instead of a percentage — we never display 100% for a window we did not fully observe.

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. Known 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. Our reachability probe cannot verify that signed-in conversations succeed — only that the service is reachable. We do not claim to detect outages before OpenAI; the official OpenAI status page is authoritative for official incident communications.

11. User-Report Aggregation, Spam Filtering & Privacy

User reports are one-click and require no login. We store only a salted, hashed fingerprint of IP and user agent for spam prevention, deduplicate repeat reports from the same source within a short window, rate-limit per IP, and auto-delete reports after 30 days. We never store personal data or track individual users.

12. Independence & Correction Policy

IsChatGPTDown.chat is an independent monitoring service and is not affiliated with, operated by, or endorsed by OpenAI. All data is collected independently, and we link to the official OpenAI status page so visitors can verify. If you spot an error in our data, please tell us via the contact page and we will correct it.

Monitoring Changelog

  • July 2026 — Rebuilt incident ingestion to use OpenAI’s official JSON incident API; added strict data-freshness rules (stale data is never shown as operational); separated consumer ChatGPT from developer/API status; corrected uptime to exclude missing monitoring intervals.

Last reviewed: July 2026.

Current Live Configuration

Check interval
Every 30 seconds
Official OpenAI status polling
Enabled
Independent HTTP probe
Enabled
Incident scrape
Every 30 minutes (last run: 2026-07-26 12:38:10)
Log retention
90 days
Degraded-latency threshold
2000 ms (connectivity latency above this is flagged as degraded)
Homepage result refresh
Every 30 seconds (display only; new checks run per the interval above)