Microsoft and OpenAI, longtime partners, each reported outages affecting key products on Monday, though there was no indication the two incidents were linked, according to the companies’ status pages and social media posts.
OpenAI said its enterprise AI agent, ChatGPT Work, had been experiencing elevated error rates and latency for roughly three hours. The company’s status page noted that users across multiple subscription plans may be unable to start or continue tasks, adding that it was working on implementing a mitigation. OpenAI’s official ChatGPT account posted on X: “ChatGPT Work isn’t working right now. Sorry about that, we’re working on a fix!”
Meanwhile, Microsoft reported issues with Exchange Online, which underpins Outlook email services. The company’s Microsoft 365 status account on X said: “We’ve confirmed that users may experience degraded functionality with various Exchange Online functionalities. We’re reviewing service telemetry and diagnostic data to isolate the source of the issue.”
Downdetector, a website that tracks user-reported outages, showed over 1,100 reports for OpenAI’s products as of 2:24 p.m. ET Monday, while reports for Microsoft Outlook reached close to 4,600 shortly after. Both figures had peaked earlier in the day.
ChatGPT Work: A New Enterprise Push
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Work in July, positioning it as an enterprise agent that competes directly with Anthropic’s Claude Cowork. The tool is designed to help staffers take on more ambitious tasks, such as creating polished slides, web apps, sheets, documents, and handling other complex projects.
The outage comes as OpenAI and Microsoft’s relationship shows signs of strain despite their deep history. Microsoft invested its first $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, gaining an early foothold in AI three years before ChatGPT’s launch. That investment later grew to $13 billion as the partnership tightened, but the two companies have been competing on multiple fronts recently.
Neither company has suggested a connection between the two disruptions, and both said they were investigating and working on fixes. As of Monday afternoon, no resolution timeline had been announced.
Source: www.cnbc.com — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/31/microsoft-outlook-and-openais-chatgpt-work-experience-outages-.html
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