ChatGPT Restored After Brief Outage as OpenAI Enters ‘Code Red’ Mode

OpenAI’s flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, is back to normal operations after a brief technical disruption on Tuesday that temporarily locked out thousands of users. The outage, though short-lived, arrived at a time when the company is operating under intense internal pressure due to escalating competition in the AI landscape.

Users began reporting sudden errors earlier in the day, prompting OpenAI to acknowledge “increased ChatGPT error rates” on its official status page. By evening, the issue had been fully addressed. According to the company, a routing misconfiguration triggered the glitch, which engineers were able to fix swiftly.

In a statement to a famous publication, OpenAI said, “Some users briefly ran into issues using ChatGPT earlier today because of a routing misconfiguration. It’s now fixed.” Tracking platform Down detector recorded close to 3,000 outage reports, suggesting that although the impact was noticeable, it remained relatively limited.

The timing of this hiccup is particularly noteworthy. OpenAI has recently been dealing with heightened internal urgency after one of its analytics partners, Mixpanel, suffered a security breach. The incident allowed an attacker to gain access to a dataset containing customer-identifiable details such as names, email addresses and analytics-linked information. While OpenAI has not disclosed the number of affected users, it clarified that the scope of leaked data was contained.

Adding to the pressure, recent reports from The Information and The Wall Street Journal reveal that CEO Sam Altman has declared a “code red” within the organisation. According to the leaked memo, OpenAI is pushing multiple teams to focus on enhancing ChatGPT’s overall quality and stability. The company assigns urgency through a colour-coded system, and the shift from a previously issued “code orange” to “code red” marks its highest level of internal alert.

For users, this means OpenAI is accelerating work on personalisation, reducing response times, improving reliability, and expanding ChatGPT’s ability to manage complex or diverse requests. As a result, several projects — including ad integrations, a health-oriented AI agent, shopping tools and the newly launched personalised daily-digest assistant Pulse — are reportedly being temporarily deprioritised. Notably, Pulse was recently praised by Altman himself, but the organisation now appears fully committed to strengthening ChatGPT’s core performance before pushing ahead with new features.

The memo also indicates short-term team rearrangements and mandatory daily check-ins with leaders overseeing these improvements — a sign of how seriously OpenAI views the competition.

And the competitive landscape is heating up fast. Despite OpenAI’s dominant market share — still above 70 per cent — recent SimilarWeb data reveals that Google’s Gemini has been steadily climbing and has now crossed the 15 per cent threshold. Gemini’s recent momentum has been powered by multiple high-performing releases, including a viral moment for its Nano Banana model known for scene-consistent image editing. Meanwhile, the Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro models have attracted attention for outperforming OpenAI’s tools in several creative and benchmark tests.

Against this backdrop, Tuesday’s outage may have been a minor technical bump, but it occurred at a moment when OpenAI is intensely focused on speed, stability, and user trust. With more than 800 million weekly users as of October, even a brief disruption underscores the urgency behind the company’s newly declared “code red” initiative.