
OpenAI is investigating an ongoing incident causing ChatGPT image generation failures and delays when uploading files.
According to hundreds of user reports on the outage tracking platform DownDetector, ChatGPT hangs and freezes when users try to upload a file and displays errors on image generation prompts.
This outage started more than an hour ago, when the company confirmed issues affecting ChatGPT image generation and the Images API.
“We’re continuing to investigate elevated errors affecting image generation in ChatGPT and the Images API. We saw an increase in failed Images API requests after our last update,” OpenAI said.
“We’re continuing to investigate file-upload processing failures and delays in ChatGPT. Some files may appear uploaded but remain unavailable while processing; other uploads may fail.”
In the latest update, shared 40 minutes ago, the company says users are still experiencing issues despite mitigation measures designed to address them.
“We’re applying mitigations and assessing their effect. Some image requests may still fail. We’ll share another update as we learn more,” it added.

Last month, OpenAI addressed another outage that was preventing users across multiple subscription plans from starting or continuing tasks.
More recently, on Thursday, it confirmed a major outage affecting ChatGPT and Codex following widespread user reports of errors affecting nearly every major ChatGPT component.
The outage came ahead of the expected launch of OpenAI’s next major AI model, GPT-6 Astra, which the company revealed in early August and claims that it can “identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels.”
This is a developing story…
Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply.
The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments.
