Summary

On April 1, 2025, from approximately 17:33 to 18:15 PDT, OpenAI experienced an outage affecting user logins and sign-ups. The issue was traced to a vendor used for certain authentication systems, leading to a subset of users encountering login errors or being logged out during this time.

Impact

All users were unable to log in or sign up for approximately 45 minutes.

• Users whose refresh tokens expired during this outage were automatically logged out.
  

Root Cause

The incident was caused by our third-party authentication vendor experiencing an outage  related to an increase in user signups. Regular database maintenance procedures did not prevent this issue.

Resolution

Our team quickly identified the issue and took immediate steps to mitigate the impact:

• Engineers activated a fallback configuration to reduce dependency on this vendor, which restored login functionality for most users by 18:15 PDT.

• We worked closely with the vendor, who performed emergency database maintenance, restoring full service availability shortly afterward.

Prevention Measures

OpenAI is implementing several improvements:

• Enhanced monitoring around authentication services.

• Greatly reducing dependency on third-party authentication providers where possible.

• Establishing ongoing monitoring of authentication system health.

  
  

We sincerely apologize for the disruption and are committed to continuously improving our infrastructure and incident response processes.