Today, ChatGPT is significantly unavailable, stopping thousands of users in the US and in many places around the world from getting to it. This is the second day in a row that it’s been unstable and people, and teams at work or in school, who use ChatGPT for work, learning, and things they do every day are frustrated.
Many users are saying they’re getting logged out suddenly, their chats are disappearing, the app and website versions are crashing, and the replies are taking a very long time. Some are getting an error message saying “Unusual activity has been detected from your device. Try again later.” Many others can’t continue with chats they were already having, or get back their recent work.
Scope of the ChatGPT outage
By around 2:20 pm ET on Tuesday, December 2, 2025, third-party sites that track these things had logged over 12,000 reports of the outage in the United States. About 93% of these complaints were specifically about ChatGPT. It seemed other OpenAI services were working fine, at least based on what people were saying early on.
For the second day in a row, lots of people are reporting widespread problems. This happening again makes people question how dependable it is, whether your information will be available when you need it, and what plans teams should have in case it goes wrong that have really incorporated AI into how they work.
What the OpenAI status page shows
At first, the official page showing the health of the system didn’t say there was a problem with the whole system, which made things more confusing for users. Later, they said ChatGPT was showing more errors from 2:42 pm ET. At 2:57 pm ET, they were still trying to figure out the problem and performance was poor. By 3:12 pm ET they had done something to lessen the impact and were watching to see if it fixed things.
So far, they haven’t publicly said exactly why this is happening. Even as it’s getting better, people are still having it cut out on them, or be very slow.
Why this outage matters
This shows just how much businesses, teachers, programmers, and people who create things now rely on AI tools for things like writing, looking up information, writing code, advertising, helping customers, and making plans. When a main program like this goes down, the flow of work stops, checking code takes longer, and there’s a bigger pile of customer service requests. For smaller teams that don’t have a second option, work can completely stop.
It also shows the danger of keeping all your work in progress inside a single AI program. If your chat history is gone or you can’t get to it, you can’t continue your work easily and your team may lose the reasoning behind recent choices.
What you can try if ChatGPT is down
To try and fix it yourself, you can refresh the page or restart the app, clear your browser’s history and cookies, use a different browser or profile, try a different internet connection or turn off a VPN, log out and back in after waiting a bit, and if it still doesn’t work, just wait for the problem to be fixed by the people at ChatGPT.
If you’re getting the message about “Unusual activity,” don’t keep trying to get in very quickly. Waiting a little while between tries can stop it from temporarily blocking you.
How to check ChatGPT service status
To get more information, check the official OpenAI page that shows the system’s health for current updates, use sites that track outages to see how many others are having problems, if you need to, watch for information from your company about the problem, and social media can give you a sense of what’s going on, but check it against the official statements.
If your work is needed right away, think about using another program or doing things by hand until it’s working normally.
Business continuity tips for AI-dependent teams
Keep copies of important questions and answers, and the results you get, saved on your computer. Use a system to track changes to AI-created code and documents, have a backup plan that doesn’t require ChatGPT, let your clients and colleagues know how much you depend on the AI service, and write down the questions you use so your team can start working on other systems.
What we know about resolution timing
There is no definite time when it will be completely fixed. The health page says they are lessening the impact and watching it, but it may be slow for some as the systems become stable and are updated in different areas.
Bottom line
In short, is ChatGPT down? Yes, a major outage is affecting users in the US and around the world, and most of the reports are about ChatGPT. Look at the OpenAI health page for updates, try the simple fixes, and have a plan for working in the short term until it’s all working again.
This situation is still changing. We will give you more information as OpenAI explains what is happening and when it will be fixed.
