OpenAI experienced a minor incident on August 20, 2026 affecting Conversations and Image Generation and 1 more component, lasting —. The incident has been resolved; the full update timeline is below.
Affected components
Update timeline
- investigating Aug 20, 2026, 01:56 PM UTC
Status: Investigating We are investigating an issue causing some users to experience errors when using Thinking in ChatGPT. Affected components Conversations (Degraded performance) ChatGPT Work (Degraded performance)
- investigating Aug 20, 2026, 02:12 PM UTC
Status: Investigating We are investigating an issue causing some users to experience errors when using Thinking mode and Image Generation in ChatGPT. Affected components Conversations (Degraded performance) Image Generation (Degraded performance) ChatGPT Work (Degraded performance)
- monitoring Aug 20, 2026, 02:53 PM UTC
Status: Monitoring We have implemented a mitigation for the issue for elevated errors for Thinking Mode and Image Generation in ChatGPT/ChatGPT Work Affected components Conversations (Degraded performance) Image Generation (Degraded performance) ChatGPT Work (Degraded performance)
- resolved Aug 20, 2026, 04:51 PM UTC
Status: Resolved All impacted services have now fully recovered. Affected components ChatGPT Work (Operational) Conversations (Operational) Image Generation (Operational)