ChatGPT Not Working? Troubleshoot in This Order (2026)

"ChatGPT isn't working" shows up in many forms — blank pages, a spinning login, messages that won't send, features that vanished — but the root cause lives in one of three layers: a platform incident, your local environment, or your account state. The first principle is to isolate the layer before touching anything; otherwise you end up tweaking browser settings during an outage, or waiting on OpenAI while your own extension is the culprit. Here's a path where every step cuts the suspect list in half.

1. Always start at the official status page

Open status.openai.com. It's OpenAI's official status page, and it ships machine-readable APIs — handy for monitoring scripts or a quick check:

• status.openai.com/api/v2/status.json — overall status, returning indicator and description (the healthy values observed 2026-09-24: none plus "All Systems Operational"; incidents are reported at their severity level)
• status.openai.com/api/v2/components.json — per-component status for 34 components: Conversations, Login, Voice mode, Connectors/Apps, ChatGPT Atlas, ChatGPT Work, Codex Web, Codex in ChatGPT Desktop, CLI, VS Code extension, plus the API endpoints (Responses, Chat Completions, Embeddings, Realtime, and more)

Quick command-line check (or drop it into a monitoring script):

curl -s https://status.openai.com/api/v2/status.json
# healthy: {"status":{"indicator":"none","description":"All Systems Operational"}, ...}

curl -s https://status.openai.com/api/v2/components.json | grep -o '"name":"[^"]*","status":"[^"]*"'
# per-component view — check Conversations and Login first

The key read: an incident on the status page means local changes can't help — wait it out; a fully green page means skip to section 2 immediately instead of waiting.

2. Local environment: bisect with an incognito window

If the platform is fine but you're not, suspects narrow to your browser, network, or account. The highest-value single step is opening chatgpt.com in an incognito/private window — extensions are disabled and existing cache is ignored, testing two culprit classes at once:

Each step halves the suspect list — far faster than the "have you tried restarting" guessing game.

3. Network egress: VPNs, proxies, and work networks

ChatGPT is sensitive to where your traffic exits:

• VPN/proxy egress: a rate-limited node or unsupported region shows up as load failures or errors. Dropping the proxy is the fastest test; if you need the VPN, switch nodes
• Work/school networks: plenty of org policies block AI sites. The test is simple — if mobile data works, it's the company egress; file an IT ticket instead of fighting your browser
• DNS or TLS interception: shows up as certificate errors or resolution failures; verify by switching DNS (or networks)

4. Account side: login state and quota

With the network cleared, what remains is the account:

• Login fails or spins: check the Login component on the status page — sign-in and conversations are reported as separate components, so login can fail alone. If it's green but you can't get in, corrupted cookies/session is the usual cause: clear site data for chatgpt.com and sign in again
• Works but features shrank / 'try later' prompts: the free tier carries quota and peak-hour limits (exact quotas as shown in the product), and those never appear on the status page — green status plus an in-product notice usually means a quota, so wait for the window to reset
• Workspace/org accounts: Workspace members can be limited by admin policy — it looks like 'features missing'; confirm with your admin

5. Cross-check the clients

Web, desktop app, and mobile app are three ends: only one failing = a problem on that end (app update, local cache), not your account or the platform. If the web works but the app won't open, update or reinstall the app; if it's the reverse, go back to section 2 for browser checks. Only when all three fail on a green status page does account-side risk control enter the picture.

6. When to wait vs when to report

• Incident posted → wait; the status page offers update subscriptions
• Full layered sweep done, still broken for hours → record the symptoms (error text, timestamp, platform) and go through official support; the entry point is as shown in the chatgpt.com interface

7. Next steps

• ChatGPT Complete Guide (2026): From Beginner to Expert — the full feature map
• OpenAI API 429 Rate Limit Errors: RateLimitError and SDK Retries Explained — API-side rate limiting (a different layer from this article)
• Codex Cloud Setup: Environments, Cloud Tasks, and the codex cloud CLI — for cloud task failures, check the Codex Web component