ChatGPT Image Generator Down For Hours: Why It Wasn't Working And Everything You Need To Know

If you tried creating an image on ChatGPT on tuesday and got stuck with an error message instead, you were not alone.

OpenAI confirmed that its image generation feature on ChatGPT came into a massive outage due to which users were not able to create or edit AI images for several hours before the company restored normal service.

Chat GPT Image Outage: What Went Wrong

Many users who tried to generate images on ChatGPT did not get proper results and the platform returned messages such as "I wasn't able to generate the image due to an error on my side."

Some users took to X platform and reported that prompts would start processing and then end without producing any image at all. The problem was reported across both the web version and the mobile app.

OpenAI acknowledged the issue in a post on X, stating that a lot of users were having trouble generating images in ChatGPT and that the team was working quickly on a fix, along with an apology for the inconvenience.

The disruption was put up as a live incident on OpenAI's status page for the whole day. According to incident records, the ChatGPT image generation component became unavailable in the evening and was showing errors for a few hours as engineers worked on a mitigation.

Later on OpenAI, confirmed that image generation functionality had fully recovered and that error rates had returned to normal levels, with the incident fully resolved later that night.

Was The Rest Of ChatGPT Affected?

This outage was mainly limited to image generation rather than the chatbot as a whole. Text-based conversations continued to work normally for most users during the disruption.

Previously, a similar kind of outage involving image generation was reported in late June this year and OpenAI has logged multiple partial outages throughout 2026