OpenAI API Down? Developer's Guide to Handling Outages (2026)

by API Status Check

Your AI-powered feature just stopped working. Users are seeing errors, completions are timing out, and your Slack is lighting up. The OpenAI API is down — now what?

If you're building with GPT-4, GPT-4o, or any OpenAI model, outages are inevitable. Here's how to detect them fast, handle them gracefully, and architect your app so the next one barely registers.

Is OpenAI Actually Down Right Now?

Before you start debugging your code, confirm it's OpenAI's issue:

  1. API Status Check — OpenAI — Independent monitoring with response time history
  2. Is OpenAI Down? — Quick status check with 24h timeline
  3. OpenAI Official Status — From OpenAI (sometimes slow to update)
  4. ChatGPT Status — ChatGPT and the API share infrastructure but can fail independently

Common Error Codes During Outages

Error Meaning Action
429 Rate limited OR overloaded Retry with backoff
500 Internal server error Retry, likely transient
502 / 503 Service unavailable Full outage, switch to fallback
timeout No response Check status page, retry
APIConnectionError Can't reach OpenAI Network issue or full outage

Key distinction: 429 during normal operation means you hit rate limits. 429 when status page shows issues means everyone is getting rate limited due to capacity problems.

Graceful Degradation Patterns

Pattern 1: Feature Toggle

Disable AI features gracefully instead of showing errors:

// Check if AI is available before showing AI-powered features
const aiStatus = await checkAIHealth();

if (!aiStatus.available) {
  // Show non-AI fallback
  return <ManualSearchResults query={query} />;
}
return <AISearchResults query={query} />;

Pattern 2: Queue and Process Later

For non-real-time AI tasks (summarization, analysis, batch processing):

async def process_with_queue(task):
    try:
        return await get_completion(task.prompt)
    except Exception:
        # Queue for later processing
        await task_queue.enqueue(task, retry_after=300)
        return {"status": "queued", "eta": "~5 minutes"}

Pattern 3: Simpler Model Fallback

If GPT-4o is overloaded, GPT-4o-mini might still be available (different capacity pools):

FALLBACK_CHAIN = ["gpt-4o", "gpt-4o-mini", "gpt-3.5-turbo"]

async def cascading_completion(prompt: str) -> str:
    for model in FALLBACK_CHAIN:
        try:
            response = await openai.chat.completions.create(
                model=model,
                messages=[{"role": "user", "content": prompt}],
                timeout=15
            )
            return response.choices[0].message.content
        except Exception:
            continue
    raise Exception("All OpenAI models unavailable")

OpenAI's Outage History

OpenAI has had notable reliability challenges as usage has scaled:

  • API outages per month: Typically 2-6 incidents of varying severity
  • Common pattern: Capacity-related degradation during peak hours (US business hours)
  • Resolution time: Minor: 15-30 min, Major: 1-4 hours

View full OpenAI incident history →

The trend has improved through 2025-2026, but building for resilience is still essential — especially if your product's core functionality depends on AI completions.

Monitoring Setup Checklist

  • Real-time status monitoring (API Status Check)
  • Application-level error rate tracking
  • Response time alerting (>5s = investigate, >15s = degrade)
  • Model fallback chain (OpenAI → Anthropic → local)
  • Response caching for common queries
  • Feature toggles for AI-dependent features
  • Queue system for non-real-time AI tasks
  • Runbook for the team (who gets paged, what to do)

Monitor OpenAI and 100+ APIs

API Status Check provides independent monitoring for OpenAI, Anthropic, and 100+ developer APIs:

  • Real-time outage detection — Often faster than official status pages
  • Response time charts — Spot degradation before it becomes downtime
  • Comparison tools — Compare AI API reliability
  • Free alerts — Know immediately when OpenAI goes down

Check OpenAI status now → | Is ChatGPT down? →

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