Two Days Of "At Capacity." Then OpenAI Posted An Incident.
Early Tuesday OpenAI confirmed degraded performance for its newest Sol model in Codex and ChatGPT Work. Users say the slowdown started well before the status page caught up.
A grapevine snail, shown for illustration. Photo: Jürgen Schoner, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Yesterday we reported that paying ChatGPT and Codex users were hitting "Selected model is at capacity" errors while OpenAI's status page showed nothing. Early Tuesday, October 13, the status page finally showed something.
What OpenAI posted
At 1:10 AM Pacific, OpenAI opened an incident titled "Degraded performance in GPT-6.1 Sol Codex and Work mode." The affected components were Codex Web, the Codex CLI, the VS Code extension, the Codex API and ChatGPT Work. At 2:30 AM the company wrote: "We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery." The incident was marked resolved at 9:36 AM Pacific with one line: "We have resolved the issue causing degraded performance with GPT-6.1 Sol in Codex and ChatGPT Work."
OpenAI did not say what went wrong, how many users were affected, or when the trouble actually started.
Users were reporting it hours earlier
At 11:49 PM Pacific on Monday, more than an hour before the incident opened, an r/codex user posting as marektracz_ wrote under the title "6.1 Sol model at capacity": "Happens more often recently. When it will be finally fixed?" The user compared it to paying for a spreadsheet program that one day says "you can't use it right now, try again later."
At 12:50 AM a Plus subscriber posting as Risonna described Codex as "unusable." A simple task, the user wrote, turns into a loop of thinking and context compacting that "takes 20-30 minutes" and ends with two small scripts. "I get nothing done," the post says. "I am a plus user, and it's the worst I've ever experienced."
At 1:46 AM, while OpenAI was still investigating, another user asked "What's wrong with 6.1-Sol today? It's been 4 times in the last 3 hours that it has stopped working."
Still complaining after the fix
The mitigation did not end the reports. At 7:55 AM Pacific, a Codex user posted a thread whose entire body is the same error repeated ten times: "Selected model is at capacity. Please try a different model." At 9:29 AM, minutes before OpenAI marked the incident resolved, another user wrote that "it takes minutes to answer a simple question or to perform a simple direct task," and that opening and analyzing one web page takes "about 7 mins."
One r/codex user posted their own benchmark the same morning, claiming GPT 6.1 Sol generated 22.3 tokens per second in normal mode against 102.6 for the older GPT 5.6 Sol, and calling it "approximately 4.6x slower." Those are the user's own measurements, not OpenAI figures, and we have not verified them.
What the status page still does not say
The capacity errors users described on Sunday and Monday never got an incident of their own. The only entry is Tuesday's, which covers about eight and a half hours. If you were locked out or stuck waiting before 1:10 AM Tuesday, the official record says nothing happened.
We will update this page if OpenAI publishes a cause or a broader explanation.
Sources
- OpenAI status: Degraded performance in GPT-6.1 Sol Codex and Work mode (October 13, 2026)
- r/codex: "6.1 Sol model at capacity" (October 12, 2026)
- r/codex: "Unusable, slow" (October 13, 2026)
- r/codex: "What's wrong with 6.1-Sol?" (October 13, 2026)
- r/codex: "Selected model is at capacity" (October 13, 2026)
- r/codex: "6.1 sol is slow" (October 13, 2026)
- r/codex: GPT 6.1 Sol speed benchmark (October 13, 2026)