OpenAI: Regional identity failure disrupts ChatGPT and Codex
On July 19, 2026, OpenAI experienced a partial outage affecting ChatGPT and Codex. Between approximately 7:08 AM and 8:05 AM PDT, a subset of users encountered elevated errors, including an inability to load existing conversations or continue active chats. Voice, Work Mode, Connectors, files, library functionality, and some Codex requests also experienced errors. The incident began during cloud infrastructure maintenance when a regional database replica supporting an internal identity service became unavailable. The remaining regional capacity could not handle the full production workload. Database requests slowed or failed, reducing cache effectiveness and increasing load across dependent services. Existing failover behavior did not redirect enough traffic away from the affected region, so protective controls began rejecting requests to prevent further overload. OpenAI restored service by manually redirecting traffic to healthy capacity in other regions.
OpenAI
