OpenAI's flagship artificial intelligence service, ChatGPT, suffered a significant global outage on Tuesday night, leaving thousands of users unable to access the platform. The San Francisco-based company confirmed it was working to mitigate the issues that caused widespread errors and degraded performance.
Widespread Service Disruption and User Reports
On December 2, 2025, users began reporting a sharp spike in problems with ChatGPT. The outage tracking website DownDetector showed a major increase in issue reports from users across the globe. OpenAI officially acknowledged the situation, stating that ChatGPT was experiencing an increase in error rates.
In a status update, the tech giant said users were facing 'degraded performance' and confirmed, 'We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation.' The company added that it was actively investigating the issue.
When questioned about the outage by the Metro, ChatGPT itself responded in a characteristically limited manner, stating it lacked real-time awareness of system outages. It suggested that slow responses or errors might feel like an outage from the user's perspective but it could not directly confirm external events.
'Code Red' Alert and Strategic Shift
The service failure comes at a critical juncture for OpenAI. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, CEO Sam Altman sent an internal memo to employees on Monday, December 1, declaring a 'code red' alert.
This directive calls for a company-wide focus on improving the core ChatGPT product, prioritising enhancements to its speed, reliability, and personalisation features. Consequently, work on several other product developments is being delayed.
Nick Turley, an OpenAI vice president and head of ChatGPT, highlighted online search as a key area of opportunity, emphasising the goal to make ChatGPT more capable and 'even more intuitive and personal'.
Mounting Pressure in a Competitive Landscape
This week marks three years since ChatGPT was first released, igniting the global generative AI boom. However, the company, valued at $500 billion, faces intense competition. Rivals like Google recently launched Gemini 3, the latest version of its AI assistant, increasing pressure on OpenAI to maintain its edge.
Despite boasting over 800 million weekly users, OpenAI is not yet profitable. The company has committed more than one trillion dollars in financial obligations to cloud computing providers and chipmakers. This massive overhead, combined with the need to satisfy backers like Oracle and Nvidia, has amplified investor concerns about a potential AI bubble.
According to the Journal's report on Altman's memo, the strategic shift means delaying projects including:
- Advertising initiatives
- AI agents for health and shopping
- A personal assistant product named Pulse
OpenAI generates revenue primarily through premium ChatGPT subscriptions, though the majority of its vast user base accesses a free version. The company did not provide an immediate comment on Tuesday regarding the outage. Tech outlet The Information also reported on the internal 'code red' memo.
