What Caused the December 2025 ChatGPT Outage?
Technical Breakdown Amid Critical Period
The December 2 incident marked the first of two consecutive days of service problems for ChatGPT. Early on December 3, the platform suffered a second outage related to Codex tasks—the backend component powering code generation features—that lasted approximately 45 minutes before being resolved. OpenAI's status page indicated that all impacted services had fully recovered by 7:16 AM local time.
"Some users briefly ran into issues using ChatGPT earlier today because of a routing misconfiguration. It's now fixed," OpenAI told CNBC. The timing proved particularly challenging given ChatGPT's massive user base—more than 800 million people use the service weekly as of October 2025, representing nearly 10% of the world's adult population.
'Code Red' Response to Mounting Competition
The outages occurred as OpenAI operates under heightened internal pressure. CEO Sam Altman declared a "code red" in an internal memo on December 2, directing the company to focus exclusively on improving ChatGPT's quality while postponing other product launches. The directive came as Google's Gemini has gained ground, with some reports indicating Gemini reached 650 million monthly active users by October.
"We are at a critical time for ChatGPT," Altman wrote in the memo obtained by The Wall Street Journal. The company is delaying plans for advertising integration, health-focused AI agents, shopping assistants, and its Pulse personal research tool to concentrate resources on enhancing ChatGPT's speed, reliability, and personalization features.
Despite ChatGPT maintaining dominant market share—ranging from 61% to 82% depending on the measurement methodology—Google's recent releases have performed well in industry benchmarks. The competitive pressure has prompted Altman to call for temporary team reallocations and daily check-ins with staff leading improvement efforts.
Security Breach Compounds Challenges
The service disruptions followed OpenAI's November 26 disclosure of a security breach at Mixpanel, a data analytics partner. An attacker gained unauthorized access to Mixpanel's systems on November 9, exporting a dataset containing names, email addresses, approximate locations, and device information for OpenAI API users. While no ChatGPT users, passwords, or API keys were compromised, OpenAI terminated its relationship with Mixpanel and launched expanded security reviews across its vendor ecosystem.
