Last Updated: December 29, 2025
December 2025 will go down as one of the worst months in ChatGPT's history. While OpenAI was busy promoting its "12 Days of OpenAI" marketing campaign, their infrastructure was crumbling. Paying customers—people shelling out $20/month for ChatGPT Plus and $200/month for Pro—were left staring at error messages, losing their conversation history, and watching their workflows grind to a halt.
This isn't speculation. This is documented. Here's every major incident from the month that OpenAI would rather you forget.
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The December Disaster Timeline
December started with a warning shot. Users experienced "various conversation errors and connectivity issues" between 6:08 PM and 6:37 PM. OpenAI claimed full recovery by 7:00 PM, but it set the tone for what was to come.
The month started with a "routing misconfiguration" that left users unable to access ChatGPT. OpenAI's status page acknowledged the issue at 2:40 PM ET, stating users were "experiencing elevated errors." The fix was rolled out by 3:12 PM ET.
But here's what scared users: this wasn't a typical timeout error. Conversations were showing as completely blank. Years of saved chats appeared to vanish. OpenAI later confirmed data wasn't lost—but the panic was real.
Starting December 8th at 12:30 PM Pacific, ChatGPT's connector system began failing. Users who had connected external services—Google Drive, Notion, Slack integrations—found their connections severed without warning.
OpenAI's engineering team "rolled out a fix," but the reality was far messier. While they claimed "the vast majority" of connectors were restored, countless users reported having to manually reconnect everything. For businesses relying on these integrations, this meant hours of lost productivity.
This was the outage that made headlines. ChatGPT went down globally, affecting millions of users across every platform—web, mobile, API. Downdetector showed over 30,000 reports at the peak.
The timing couldn't have been worse. It happened in the middle of OpenAI's "12 Days of OpenAI" promotional campaign, where they were announcing new features daily. The irony wasn't lost on anyone: OpenAI was hyping new capabilities while their existing service was completely offline.
For three days, enterprise users who rely on Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication couldn't access ChatGPT. The issue started Tuesday, December 16 at 8:02 AM and wasn't resolved until Thursday, December 18 at 10:46 PM.
This hit corporate teams hard. Companies that integrated ChatGPT into their SSO systems found their employees locked out. Productivity ground to a halt while IT departments scrambled for workarounds.
Android users experienced elevated error rates while trying to use ChatGPT. The mobile app became unreliable, with requests failing intermittently throughout the day.
Merry Christmas from OpenAI! Users woke up on December 25th to find they couldn't load their conversation history. Custom GPTs were also affected—files couldn't be downloaded. For people who store important information in their ChatGPT conversations, this was a nightmare.
OpenAI applied mitigation and claimed full recovery by 9:41 AM, but reports of missing conversations continued throughout the day.
What Users Actually Experienced
"I'm a ChatGPT Pro subscriber paying $200/month. I lost access for 12 hours during the December 11th outage. That's $80 worth of service I didn't receive. OpenAI's response? Nothing. No credit, no apology, no explanation." — Reddit user, r/ChatGPT
"My entire workflow depends on ChatGPT. When the connectors went down on December 8th, I couldn't access any of my integrated documents. It took me 3 hours to reconnect everything manually. Three hours of billable time, gone." — Software developer, Twitter/X
"The conversation history bug on Christmas was the last straw for me. I had years of conversations saved—research notes, project ideas, code snippets. Watching them disappear, even temporarily, made me realize how dangerous it is to rely on this service." — ChatGPT Plus subscriber
December 11-12: A Closer Look at the Global Outage
The Pattern Nobody's Talking About
Here's what should concern every ChatGPT user: these outages are getting more frequent, not less. OpenAI claims 98.97% uptime, but that number is misleading. It doesn't account for:
- Degraded performance - When ChatGPT is "up" but running at a fraction of its normal speed
- Feature-specific outages - When certain features (like connectors or file uploads) fail while the main chat works
- Regional issues - When the service is down in specific geographic areas
- Account-specific problems - When certain users can't access their accounts while others can
The real uptime—the percentage of time when all features work correctly for all users—is significantly lower. And for a service that costs up to $200/month, that's unacceptable.
OpenAI's Response: Silence
What's most frustrating isn't the outages themselves—technology fails, that's expected. It's OpenAI's response, or lack thereof:
- No proactive communication - Users had to discover outages on their own
- No compensation - Zero credits or refunds for paying customers
- No post-mortems - No detailed explanations of what went wrong
- No SLA guarantees - Even enterprise customers have no uptime guarantees
Meanwhile, OpenAI continues to raise prices and push new subscription tiers. They want $200/month for ChatGPT Pro, but can't guarantee the service will be available when you need it.
What You Can Do
If you're a ChatGPT user affected by these outages, here are your options:
1. Document Everything - Screenshot error messages, note timestamps, save any communication from OpenAI. This documentation is essential if you ever need to dispute charges or file complaints.
2. Request Refunds - OpenAI's terms don't guarantee refunds, but chargebacks through your credit card company are possible if you can demonstrate you didn't receive the service you paid for.
3. Explore Alternatives - Check our alternatives page for other AI assistants that may better suit your needs.
4. File Complaints - The FTC accepts complaints about services that don't deliver what they promise. If you're a paying customer who lost access during these outages, your complaint matters.
5. Export Your Data - Don't keep critical information solely in ChatGPT. Export your conversations regularly. OpenAI provides data export tools in settings.
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