File uploads in ChatGPT broke for nearly five hours on 3 November 2026. OpenAI's own status page tracked the fault from start to mitigation, and the problem sat with their file handling, not with your account or network.
Started
00:46 UTC
Duration
Lasted 4h 55m
Source
IsDown
Next time
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Affected components: ChatGPT, File uploads
What happened?
OpenAI's status page opened this incident at 00:46 UTC, titled "File upload errors in ChatGPT". The first update said some users couldn't upload files to ChatGPT or have ChatGPT read files already uploaded, and that a mitigation was being worked on. Twelve minutes later, at 00:58, the status flipped back to investigating, with OpenAI saying they were checking how the issue affected users and would update when they knew more. At 02:06 they identified elevated errors for the affected services and said they were working on a mitigation again. By 02:51 a mitigation had been applied and OpenAI moved to monitoring to confirm recovery. The incident closed out with a total duration of 4 hours and 55 minutes. Two components were listed as affected: ChatGPT itself and File uploads specifically. No user reports were logged in this window, so the only account of what happened comes from OpenAI's own four updates. Those four updates are also the full extent of OpenAI's public record for this incident: no post-mortem has been published, and the status page gives no explanation of what caused the elevated errors or what the mitigation actually changed. Across the last 90 days OpenAI has logged 103 incidents with a median duration of 1 hour 42 minutes, so this one ran well longer than typical.
Learning
This incident sat specifically in file handling, a backend path that only engages when a file is attached to a chat, so a plain uptime check against the main ChatGPT interface could easily stay green while uploads failed underneath it. UptimeRobot's own 30 day figures show 41 incidents against OpenAI in that window, all resolved, with a median duration of 1h 49m, which is the kind of pattern you only see if you're watching the provider's own status feed rather than just pinging an endpoint. That's the general shape of this kind of failure: the service answers, the page loads, but one feature quietly throws errors because a dependency behind it is broken. If your product uploads documents, images or files through ChatGPT's API, this is exactly the failure mode that would show up as support tickets with no matching alert on your side. Your monitoring covers your half, UptimeRobot now watches the provider's half too, so next time you know which side broke without guessing.
