The popular AI chatbot went offline for many users this morning.
By
Timothy Beck Werth
Tech Editor
Timothy Beck Werth is the Tech Editor at Mashable, where he leads coverage and assignments for the Tech and Shopping verticals. Tim has over 15 years of experience as a journalist and editor, and he has particular experience covering and testing consumer technology, smart home gadgets, and men’s grooming and style products. Previously, he was the Managing Editor and then Site Director of SPY.com, a men's product review and lifestyle website. As a writer for GQ, he covered everything from bull-riding competitions to the best Legos for adults, and he’s also contributed to publications such as The Daily Beast, Gear Patrol, and The Awl.
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Credit: Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images
UPDATE: Nov. 18, 2025, 10:21 a.m. EST As of 10:18 a.m. ET, OpenAI reported that its services had been restored. The latest message on its status page reads: "All impacted services have now fully recovered. The detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) will be published in the next 5 business days." You can read our original story on the outage below.
Many users who attempted to log in to the ChatGPT website this morning were met with an error message: "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed."
At Downdetector, hundreds of users were similarly reporting problems, starting around 6:30 a.m. ET and then ramping up significantly throughout the morning. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)
And at 7:12 a.m. ET, OpenAI confirmed on a status page that it was investigating a problem with some of its websites. A later update on the OpenAI website reads, "We have confirmed that the incident is caused by an issue with one of our third-party service providers. We will provide updates as they become available."
Mashable Light Speed
The issue is connected to the ongoing Cloudflare outage. ChatGPT is one of many affected services, which also include X, Grindr, Canva, Spotify, and YouTube. When a major cloud computing platform, such as AWS or Cloudflare, experiences a problem, it can cause ripple effects throughout the World Wide Web.
However, we do have some good news for ChatGPT users. The AI chatbot's iOS app appears to be functioning normally, as of this writing. It's specifically the ChatGPT website that appears to be suffering problems.
It's too soon to say what caused the Cloudflare outage. The latest update from Cloudflare states that the cloud services platform was "working on restoring service for application services customers."
This is a developing story...
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
Timothy Beck Werth is the Tech Editor at Mashable, where he leads coverage and assignments for the Tech and Shopping verticals. Tim has over 15 years of experience as a journalist and editor, and he has particular experience covering and testing consumer technology, smart home gadgets, and men’s grooming and style products. Previously, he was the Managing Editor and then Site Director of SPY.com, a men's product review and lifestyle website. As a writer for GQ, he covered everything from bull-riding competitions to the best Legos for adults, and he’s also contributed to publications such as The Daily Beast, Gear Patrol, and The Awl.
Tim studied print journalism at the University of Southern California. He currently splits his time between Brooklyn, NY and Charleston, SC. He's currently working on his second novel, a science-fiction book.
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