Published on August 28, 2026 · The mitza.es team
August 2026 has been a rough month for ChatGPT. Several global service outages have been recorded, including incidents on August 19 and 25, and a new outage on August 27 that left the service down for hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, right at a time when more and more businesses rely on this tool for everyday tasks.
It wasn't just chat: the API went down too
The most relevant part for any business using AI in its operations is that these outages didn't only affect the chat interface used by the general public. OpenAI confirmed that the disruption also reached its API, Codex and Sora, its video generation tool. In other words, any internal company process built on top of OpenAI's API — automations, chatbots, programmatic content generation — was affected just like the public interface.
What caused the failures
According to OpenAI itself, one of the incidents was due to authentication key failures, while another was attributed to an issue with an external provider that supplies data to its systems. In both cases, the cause wasn't the AI model itself, but the infrastructure surrounding it — the same infrastructure that supports both free and paid usage.
Why this matters even if you only use the free version
- If you generate content, customer service replies or drafts with AI as part of your daily routine, an outage leaves you without that tool with no warning.
- If you've automated internal processes on top of the API, the outage isn't just an inconvenience: it can stop an entire workflow.
- The more critical functions depend on a single AI provider, the bigger the impact of a disruption.
How to reduce the risk without giving up on AI
It's not about ditching these tools, which still bring enormous value, as we already explained in our guide to free AI tools for SMEs. It's about not building a critical process on a single point of failure: having a backup plan to respond to customers if your AI-powered WhatsApp Business assistant goes down, or manually reviewing content before publishing it instead of relying on real-time AI with no oversight.
An infrastructure problem, not a problem with the technology itself
These outages are a good reminder that generative AI, however powerful, is still an external service subject to the same risks as any other: provider failures, authentication issues, demand spikes. If you want to review which of your business processes depend on external tools and how to give them a reasonable backup, our content generation service combines AI with real editorial review precisely so you don't depend on the machine working perfectly at all times.