OpenAI’s ChatGPT faced a global outage starting around 8 p.m. on August 19 U.S. Eastern Time, affecting users in the United States, Europe and other regions. Affected users could not log in, register accounts, access saved chat records or send messages, with error messages such as Too many concurrent requests appearing. The coding platform Codex and related API services also experienced anomalies, impacting developers’ ability to use AI tools. OpenAI confirmed the issue on its status page and stated its engineering team was working to restore service, though the outage persisted as of 8:15 p.m. the same day. The disruption underscores the importance of stable AI infrastructure, with platform availability becoming a key factor in competition among AI service providers.