What do I use when ChatGPT is down? Check in thirty seconds, then switch

The thirty second check

Open status.openai.com in a new tab. An active incident affecting ChatGPT is posted there, usually within minutes of the problem starting, and if you see one you can stop diagnosing. If the page says everything is operational, the problem is almost certainly on your end: your own usage cap, your browser, your network, or your account. Four problems, four different fixes, and guessing wrong costs you the twenty minutes you did not have. One thing before you touch refresh: copy whatever is sitting in the message box, because that is the only part of your work an outage can actually destroy, and the next section covers the rest of it.

People assume an outage far more often than one is happening, because a cap and a crash feel identical from where you sit: you type, nothing useful comes back. But if you are capped, no amount of refreshing helps, and if the service is genuinely down, clearing your cache is wasted effort.

What you see	What it usually means	What actually fixes it
Status page shows an active ChatGPT incident	A real outage	Nothing on your end. Switch tools and come back later
A message about reaching a limit, or being asked to wait or upgrade	Your own usage cap	Wait for the window to reset, switch to a model you have not exhausted, or use another provider
The page loads but every reply errors out, and the status page is green	Often browser or network	Try a private window with extensions off, then a different browser, then your phone on mobile data
The whole site fails to load, and the status page is green	Usually network or DNS	Test another site, restart the router, try mobile data
Logged out unexpectedly, or told your account is unavailable	An account problem	Sign in again, then check the email on file for anything from OpenAI

One more check worth ten seconds: load ChatGPT on your phone over mobile data, with wifi off. If it works there and not on your laptop, the problem is local, whatever a crowdsourced outage tracker says. Those trackers count complaints, which spike whenever a popular service has any bad minute anywhere. Treat them as a hint and the official status page as the answer.

Before you refresh: do not lose the work in the tab

During an outage the instinct is to keep pressing refresh, and the refresh is what costs you the draft. Before you diagnose anything further, spend twenty seconds on this in order.

1. Select everything in the message box and copy it. A long prompt you have been shaping for ten minutes is the thing most likely to disappear. Paste it into a note, a document, anywhere outside the browser tab.
2. Copy the last useful answer too. If a reply is half rendered on screen, select what is visible and copy that as well. A partial answer is worth more than a lost one.
3. Do not close the tab, and do not use the back button. An unsent message usually survives in the box as long as the page stays open. It rarely survives a navigation.
4. Do not send the same message repeatedly. Retrying twenty times does not move you up a queue. It just gives you twenty more chances to hit an error, and on a capped account it can burn what allowance you have left.
5. Check whether the answer actually arrived. Some outages break the display, not the generation. Open the conversation in a second tab or on the phone app before you assume the reply is gone.

Then note where you stopped in one line of plain text: the goal, the constraints, the last thing the model got right. That line is what lets you restart in another app in thirty seconds instead of reconstructing the thread from memory.

Outage or rate limit, because the fixes are opposite

This is the misdiagnosis that wastes the most time. A rate limit is not a failure, it is the product working as designed: you have used your allowance of a particular model for now, and the app is asking you to wait, switch models, or pay more. An outage is the service failing for everybody at once.

The reliable tells are these. A cap message names you: it talks about your limit, your plan, your reset time, and it typically offers a lesser model or an upgrade instead of just failing. An outage message does not know who you are. It is a generic error, it hits every conversation including brand new ones, it hits the mobile app and the website together, and other people are posting about it within minutes. If your existing chats load fine and only one specific model refuses while another model in the same picker still answers, that is a cap.

OpenAI does not publish its allowances as fixed numbers you can plan against, and both the numbers and the reset structure have changed repeatedly without announcement, so any article quoting a precise figure is quoting something that may already be wrong. One thing is worth knowing as of August 2026: OpenAI's own pricing page lists everyday text chats as unlimited across all four consumer tiers, Free, Go, Plus and Pro, subject to the usual abuse guardrails. What still carries real limits is uploads, images, voice, deep research, memory and Codex access, tightening as you go down the tiers, so a wall you hit is almost always one of those rather than a chat quota. What OpenAI does not say anywhere public is how those remaining caps refill, so treat any reset window you read as a guess, including ours. If your message is about a limit rather than an error, what to do when ChatGPT says you have reached your limit covers the reset question properly.

There is a third lookalike, and it produces no error at all. If everything still sends but the answers have gone short, flat and forgetful, you have most likely been moved onto a smaller fallback model, which why ChatGPT switched you to a weaker model explains. Three problems, one feeling. An outage does not know who you are, a cap names you and your plan, and a downgrade says nothing whatsoever.

What still works while ChatGPT is down

The useful fact about AI outages is that they are rarely shared. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and xAI each train the models they serve, and run them on different data centers, different cloud contracts and different deploy schedules. Simultaneous failures do happen when a large shared dependency breaks, but the ordinary case is one provider having a bad hour while everything else answers normally. So the practical answer is usually just: use a different one, free, in the next two minutes.

Every option below has a free tier you can sign up for in a minute, though some ask for a phone number or a linked account rather than just an email, depending on where you are. Most also publish a public status page, so you can confirm a candidate is healthy before you invest any time. Status page addresses move occasionally, so if one does not resolve, search for the provider name plus the word status rather than assuming the service is fine.

One thing worth knowing before you start signing up in a hurry: none of these are available in every country. Anthropic and Google each publish a supported countries page, for Claude and for Gemini. Several of the others publish no list at all, so with those you find out by trying. Either way, a refused signup is usually a location limit rather than a problem with your email or your card, so pick a different name from the table instead of fighting the one that turned you away.

Instead of ChatGPT	Good for	Its status page
Claude, at claude.ai	Long documents, careful writing, code review	status.claude.com
Gemini, at gemini.google.com	General questions, anything already in Google Docs or Gmail	The Google Workspace status dashboard at google.com/appsstatus/dashboard lists Gemini as a product
Microsoft Copilot, at copilot.microsoft.com	A familiar assistant if you already live in Windows or Office, but it serves OpenAI models alongside Microsoft's own, so an OpenAI model incident can reach it too	No consumer status page. Service health sits in the Microsoft 365 admin center, which a personal account cannot open, so try it and see
Perplexity, at perplexity.ai	Questions that need current sources and citations, though its model picker also offers OpenAI models, so stay on its own Sonar models during an OpenAI incident	status.perplexity.com
Mistral Vibe, at chat.mistral.ai	Fast general chat, European hosting	status.mistral.ai
Grok, at grok.com	General chat, and anything anchored in posts on X	status.x.ai
DeepSeek, at chat.deepseek.com	Reasoning and math style problems at no cost	status.deepseek.com

Two notes on switching well. Paste your context back in rather than expecting continuity, since no other provider can see your ChatGPT history: lead with a one paragraph summary of the task and what has already been decided. And do not treat the substitute as second best by default. Plenty of people discover during an outage that the tool they were forced onto suits their work better. The fuller comparison of ChatGPT alternatives goes through them by use case.

How often this actually happens

Worth keeping in proportion, because the reaction online to any incident is always out of proportion to it. On 16 August 2026, the OpenAI status page reported trailing 90 day uptime of 99.68 percent for the ChatGPT component group and 99.94 percent for the APIs. On the same day, the Claude status page reported 99.36 percent for claude.ai and 99.45 percent for the Claude API over its own trailing 90 days. Both pages note that these figures are aggregated across tiers, models and error types, so what any individual account experienced can be better or worse than the headline number. All four are rolling 90 day windows, so they will have moved by the time you read this. The shape of the number is the point, not the decimal.

Those numbers say two things at once. Outages are uncommon: the overwhelming majority of the time, the thing works. And the shortfall is not nothing, since a figure in that range still amounts to hours of degraded or unavailable service across a quarter, distributed with no regard for your calendar.

The conclusion is not that these services are unreliable. It is that any single one of them is a single point of failure for whatever you now depend on it for, and that is worth exactly as much attention as the cost of losing it for an hour. If that cost is zero, close this tab and go for a coffee. If you have a client deliverable due at four, read the last section.

Making the next outage a non event

The fix is boring and takes ten minutes once. It is the same fix used for any dependency you cannot control: have a second one that already works and does not need setting up under pressure.

• Create the fallback account now, not during the outage. Signing up while stressed, on a site you have never used, with a verification email that is slow to arrive, is the worst possible time. Free accounts on Claude and Gemini cost nothing and take a minute each.
• Subscribe to the status pages. Both status.openai.com and status.claude.com offer email alerts, and the Claude page also supports SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, webhooks and RSS. An alert in your inbox beats twenty minutes of wondering whether it is you.
• Keep prompts out of the chat box. If a prompt matters enough to reuse, it belongs in a notes file. Then an outage costs you a paste, not a rewrite.
• Know which of your work is genuinely blocked. Usually less than you think. Reading, outlining, and deciding what you want the model to do are all still possible while the model is unavailable, and doing them first makes the eventual prompt better anyway.
• Do not pay three providers just for redundancy. Individual plans from the major providers run around 20 dollars a month each as of August 2026, and stacking them for insurance is an expensive way to buy an hour a quarter. Check each provider's current pricing page before you commit to anything.

The fallback is also worth having for reasons that have nothing to do with outages, and using several models on the same task covers what a second model is good for on a normal day.