Summary
On Aug 31, 2026, between approximately 5:20 p.m. and 5:51 p.m. PDT, some users experienced elevated errors in ChatGPT conversations. A code change to a supporting feature caused some conversation requests to fail. Service recovered after the change was rolled back.
Impact
During this period:
Free, Go, and signed-out users may have experienced errors in ChatGPT conversations.
Root Cause
A code change introduced a compatibility issue in a service supporting ChatGPT conversations. Errors from that service affected the broader conversation flow, preventing some requests from completing.
Resolution
Engineers rolled back the change at approximately 5:46 p.m. PDT. Service recovered by approximately 5:51 p.m. PDT as the rollback took effect. We continued monitoring before marking the public incident resolved at 6:00 p.m. PDT.
Prevention and Improvements
We have identified the following areas for improvement to reduce the likelihood and impact of similar incidents:
Keep conversations available when supporting features fail. Review error handling so failures in nonessential features do not interrupt conversations.
Strengthen compatibility checks. Expand validation of configuration changes across the service versions that must support them.
Improve alert escalation. Route significant experiment-related errors directly to the teams responsible for responding.
Speed up mitigation. Evaluate automatically disabling experiments or nonessential features when they cause significant errors.
We apologize for the disruption and are continuing to strengthen the reliability of the systems that support ChatGPT
