September 05, 2026 – Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage-tracking website, logged a surge in complaints from users of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Codex on September 3, with the disruption also felt across Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
Users around the world, including in the UAE, ran into errors while trying to use OpenAI’s tools on September 3, as the company worked to identify and fix the problem.
Outage-tracking site Downdetector recorded a spike in complaints that day, with 73 per cent of reports tied to ChatGPT and another 15 per cent tied to Codex, OpenAI’s coding tool. A Downdetector map of the affected regions showed users in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and other parts of the UAE among those reporting trouble, alongside users elsewhere in the world.
OpenAI acknowledged the disruption in a series of status updates through the evening, UAE time. At 6:58 PM GST, the company said it was “investigating the issue for the listed services.” A short while later, it said mitigation had been applied and that it was monitoring the recovery. By 7:43 PM GST, however, OpenAI reported it had identified the issue and that users were still experiencing degraded performance.
OpenAI’s product line includes ChatGPT for conversational AI, DALL-E for image generation, its GPT-4 family of language models, and the OpenAI API platform used by developers building AI-powered tools, all of which can be affected when the company’s backend runs into trouble.
As of the last update, OpenAI had not given a timeline for full recovery.
