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When ChatGPT or Codex breaks, the first question is usually “is this just me?” OpenAI publishes an answer at status.openai.com, and it turns out to be a busier page than most people realise. We read the full incident history for 1 to 26 September 2026 and counted 37 separate logged incidents, an average of more than one a day, across ChatGPT, Codex, the API and related services. The four we checked in detail each resolved in under two and a half hours, though we did not check the other 33. We also checked this against what users were reporting on OpenAI’s community forum in the same window, and the two do not always line up, which is worth knowing before you assume a problem is you, or assume it is officially acknowledged.

Key takeaways

1. OpenAI’s status history logged 37 separate incidents between 1 and 26 September 2026, spread across 21 of those 26 days.
2. The four incidents we checked in detail lasted between 25 minutes and about 2 hours 12 minutes, and OpenAI published a full root-cause write-up for the largest one.
3. A multi-day “Selected model is at capacity” problem that Codex Pro users described in an 87-post community thread does not clearly match any single logged incident of matching length in the same window.
4. The status page reports errors in aggregate. An issue affecting only some accounts, as several users reported, may not appear as a public incident at all.

Last reviewed 27 September 2026. We read OpenAI’s status history and four individual incident pages, plus one published write-up, in a browser on that date. We also read two threads on OpenAI’s Developer Community forum. This article does not cover OpenAI’s API status for enterprise customers separately, and status pages are updated by OpenAI, so counts may differ if you check again later.

How many incidents were there, really?

Counting directly from OpenAI’s own status history, retrieved 27 September 2026, we found 37 separate incident entries dated between 1 and 26 September 2026. That is 21 days out of 26 with at least one incident, and several days had three or four separate ones logged at different times, for example four on 15 September and four on 11 September. Every one we saw was marked Resolved by the time we read it.

We grouped the 37 by what OpenAI’s own titles say was affected. ChatGPT’s “Work” mode (its agentic browsing and task feature) appeared in 9, some plan explicitly named as affected, such as Plus, Pro, Free or Go, appeared in 6, Codex appeared in 5, and API or backend services such as the Responses API or Agents API appeared in 5. Three were described as regional, affecting Europe or the Asia-Pacific region. Two were about image generation. The remaining 7 covered support delays, sign-in, billing and account creation.

How long did they actually last?

The status history page lists when each incident started but not always how long it took to resolve, so we opened four individual incident pages to check:

None of the four we checked stayed open longer than 2 hours 12 minutes by the status log’s own timestamps. That matters, because it is still shorter than what some users were describing about their own experience in the same window, which we cover next.

What OpenAI’s write-up says about its biggest logged incident

The 3 September incident is the one OpenAI wrote up in detail (read the write-up, retrieved 2026-09-27), and it gives a different, more specific duration than the status log. It says the disruption began at approximately 7:43 a.m. Pacific time, when “a routing configuration change prevented affected requests from reaching our services”, causing errors including “not found” responses across ChatGPT on web, mobile and desktop, and Codex on the CLI and desktop app, plus some sign-in and account creation errors. OpenAI says the main disruption was mitigated by about 8:20 a.m. Pacific, about 37 minutes, then lists four planned improvements: keeping valid routes available during configuration changes, limiting the reach of routing changes, reducing errors while traffic returns, and detecting routing failures sooner. We could not reconcile that 37-minute figure with the 2-hour-12-minute gap shown on the status log’s own investigating-to-resolved timestamps for the same incident, and OpenAI’s page does not explain the difference. Our guess is that the write-up describes the main user-facing disruption while the log’s timestamps include earlier monitoring or a longer tail of recovery, but that is our guess, not something the page states.

The gap between the status page and what Codex Pro users reported

Separately from the status history, we read an 87-post thread on OpenAI’s Developer Community forum, “Selected model is at capacity, please try a different model” (28,800 views, 63 users, 100 likes, retrieved 2026-09-27). Multiple ChatGPT Pro subscribers using Codex, OpenAI’s coding tool, described the error appearing very frequently starting around 10 September 2026, some saying it made their paid Pro accounts “nearly impossible” to use for days. An OpenAI staff member, posting as Prashant_Pardesi, replied on 10 September: “We are looking into this issue and will provide an update soon.” Some users reported the problem continuing into the following days, with one user’s detailed account (in a related thread) describing degraded Codex performance and capacity errors from 10 through at least 15 September, alongside conflicting guesses from users about the cause, including account flagging, IP or proxy use, and account age. None of these guesses were confirmed by OpenAI in what we read.

We could not find a single logged status-page incident covering that full multi-day span at that length. The closest matches by date are the 14 September entry above, at 71 minutes, and the 9 September “usage limit resets” entry, at 25 minutes and explicitly scoped to “some Codex users”. We do not know whether the longer, user-described problem was folded into these shorter official entries, affected only specific accounts in a way that does not get a public incident, or is something else entirely. OpenAI’s own status page includes the caveat that “individual customer availability may vary depending on their subscription tier as well as the specific model and API features in use”, which fits an account-specific problem not showing as a broad incident. We are stating what we found and did not find, not guessing at which explanation is correct.

What this means if you hit an error today

• Check the status page first. status.openai.com/history lists recent incidents, and most of what we saw resolved in under two hours.
• If nothing is listed, your case may still be real. Our reading shows the page reports aggregate errors, and an account-specific problem may not appear on it at all, so an empty status page does not rule out a genuine problem with your account.
• Search the Developer Community forum at community.openai.com for your exact error message. If others are reporting the same thing with similar timing, it is more likely a broader issue.
• If it is Codex and only your account is affected, one user in the thread we read said switching from Deep Research to Guided Learning worked for them; others reported the same switch made no difference. We found no fix confirmed to work generally, beyond OpenAI’s support channel.
• Report it either way. In the thread we read, OpenAI staff replied after a large number of users had posted about the same error in one place. We don’t know whether the volume of posts caused the reply, but it is where a staff response appeared.

What we could not verify

• We opened only 4 of the 37 incidents to check exact duration. The other 33 are counted from the history page’s titles and dates only.
• We do not have a reliable way to confirm whether the multi-day Codex capacity reports match, overlap with, or are separate from the shorter logged incidents.
• We read OpenAI’s Developer Community forum, not Reddit or other platforms, so there may be reports elsewhere we did not see.
• This count covers 1 to 26 September 2026 only, as read on 27 September, and OpenAI’s page will show more entries as the month continues.
• Our category groupings are our own reading of OpenAI’s incident titles, not a classification OpenAI publishes itself.

This is the same primary-source method we used for our Gemini Live troubleshooting analysis, and if a Gemini error code is what sent you here, our Gemini error code analysis covers that instead.

How we researched this

On 27 September 2026 we opened status.openai.com/history in a browser and copied the full list of incidents from 1 to 26 September 2026, then counted and grouped them by the title OpenAI gave each one. We opened four individual incident pages, chosen for relevance to Codex and to cross-check against the forum thread, and recorded the identified and resolved timestamps shown on each. We read the published write-up for the 3 September incident in full. Separately, we read two threads on OpenAI’s Developer Community forum about a Codex capacity error, recording vote and view counts, dates, and any OpenAI staff replies, as displayed on 27 September 2026. Where we describe what happened, it comes from OpenAI’s own page or a forum post; where we note something we could not confirm, we say so.

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