ChatGPT and Codex Down Today: Six AI Tools That Cover the Gap

OpenAI’s status page listed two active incidents on Friday morning, one warning that “users may encounter issues with conversations” on ChatGPT and a second flagging login and account-creation problems across the consumer surface and the application programming interface. Codex, the coding-specific product that runs on the same authentication plumbing, tends to wobble whenever either of those breaks. Six tools cover almost everything OpenAI users were asking for this morning: Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and DeepSeek.

None of them is a one-for-one swap, which is the catch. Picking the right substitute depends on whether the task in front of you is text, code, research, or images, and on which app you already have logged in.

What Broke on OpenAI’s Status Page Today

A check of the live OpenAI status dashboard at the time of writing shows two open incidents. The first, scoped to the consumer chat surface, reports trouble with conversations and is in the monitoring phase after mitigation. The second is broader: users may encounter issues logging in or creating an account, with both the APIs and the consumer chat product flagged as affected components.

The coding tool is not separately listed in either incident, which is the source of the confusion lighting up developer forums today. When the authentication layer wobbles, sessions running on top can fail to start, fail to refresh tokens, or hang halfway through a long completion. That is the practical reason a coding workflow can stall even when the chat window eventually returns.

May has carried several smaller hits on the same dashboard. A context-compaction latency event landed on May 28, an elevated-error window on the API followed the same afternoon, and an Android Business workspace-switching bug ran for more than eleven hours starting May 27. None lasted long. All resolved inside the day. The cumulative effect, however, is that the AI tab open on most desks is no longer the only one a careful user keeps within reach.

• 2 incidents open on the OpenAI dashboard at the time of writing.
• 5 separate disruptions logged across the consumer chat, the coding product, the API, and the Android client during May.
• 19 user-submitted outage reports filed on third-party trackers in the past twenty-four hours.

Four All-Purpose Substitutes Worth Bookmarking

For non-coding work, writing, research, slides, summarisation, image generation, the four names below already handle the bulk of what most users were running through ChatGPT this morning, and three of them have free tiers that need no credit card.

Gemini for Research and Workspace

Google’s Gemini free tier allows up to 30 prompts per day on the basic plan, plus five Deep Research reports per month and twenty image generations per day. Its single biggest practical edge is native integration with Gmail, Docs, Drive, and Sheets, so a research request that ends in a one-page brief or a slide outline does not need a copy-paste round trip between tabs.

Claude for Long Writing and Reports

The chat tool from Anthropic has built a reputation among writers, analysts, and academic users for following long instruction stacks and holding context across a document-length reply. Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.6 in April and reports a SWE-bench Verified score above 80%, which matters mostly because the same model also powers the Claude Code product used by developers later in this guide.

Microsoft Copilot Inside Office and Edge

Microsoft’s chat assistant is the easiest substitute for anyone already inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or Edge. It is bundled into the free Edge browser, and the chat surface at copilot.microsoft.com is unmetered for most everyday queries. Office 365 subscribers also get inline assistance in the desktop apps, which is the cleanest path for slide decks, pivot tables, and proposal drafts.

Grok and Perplexity for Real-Time and Cited Answers

Grok, available on X and at grok.com, leans on real-time access to the public X conversation and has a free chat surface for most users. Perplexity AI is the cleaner pick when the answer needs citations: every response carries inline source links, which makes it the default for journalists, students, and anyone who has to defend the claim later. India contributes the largest single share of Perplexity’s traffic, roughly 22.75% of monthly visits according to its public usage data.

Coding Alternatives When Codex Stalls

The coding stack is where outages hurt most, because a stalled chat window costs an idea while a stalled coding session can lose an hour of context. Four substitutes carry the load.

Claude Code From Anthropic

Claude Code is the agentic coding product Anthropic has pushed hardest this year, and the one most often cited in head-to-head reviews with OpenAI’s coding tool this spring. It handles multi-file edits, runs tests against its own output, and ships inside a terminal-first workflow that mirrors what most developers were already used to.

GitHub Copilot Inside VS Code

GitHub’s free Copilot tier covers 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month, with a model choice between Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet and OpenAI’s GPT-4o. That budget covers a few hours of light work per week. Heavier users hit the cap in three to five days and either move to the $10 Pro tier or switch to a thicker tool below.

Cursor for Multi-File Agent Runs

Cursor’s free Hobby plan includes 2,000 completions and 50 slow premium-model requests per month. The $20 Pro tier unlocks 500 fast premium-model calls, Agent mode for background tasks, and Composer for multi-file edits. Its frontier-model menu (Claude 4.x, Gemini 2.5, GPT-4o) means the editor stays useful even when one model provider is offline.

DeepSeek for the Free Path

DeepSeek’s chat surface at chat.deepseek.com is the strongest no-paywall option. The company released DeepSeek V4 Pro on April 24 with a one-million-token context window and a SWE-Bench Verified score of 80.6%, putting it in the same bracket as paid frontier models on coding tasks.

Free Tiers, Limits, and Best Use Compared

Pick by job, not by hype. The table below maps the most common chat and coding workloads to a free or near-free alternative, so the next time the primary tab goes dark, the swap is one click.

Picking One in the Next Ten Minutes

Outage triage is mostly about matching the broken job to the substitute already signed in.

• Research with sources: Perplexity, no setup needed.
• Office and Excel work: Microsoft’s chat assistant inside the app already open.
• Long-form writing or report drafting: the Anthropic chat at claude.ai.
• Code completion inside VS Code: GitHub’s free Copilot allowance.
• A multi-file build or agent run: Cursor’s free Hobby plan, then upgrade only if you burn the credits the same day.
• A fully free coding fallback: DeepSeek’s web chat.
• Images alongside text: Gemini or Grok, both free.

A practical move worth making before the next incident: sign in to two of the above this afternoon. The friction is logging in cold while the deadline is live. Once an account exists and the muscle memory is built, the switching cost on the next outage drops to a tab change.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is ChatGPT Down Today?

Yes, in part. The OpenAI status page lists two active incidents at the time of writing. One affects conversations on the consumer chat surface; the other affects logins across that product and the API. Both are in the monitoring phase after mitigation was applied.

Why Is My Coding Tool Failing While the Chat Window Works?

Codex shares OpenAI’s authentication and API plumbing. When the account or API services wobble, coding sessions running on top can fail to start, fail to refresh tokens, or hang on long completions, even after the consumer chat surface returns.

What Is the Best Free Writing Substitute Right Now?

Anthropic’s chat at claude.ai is the most-cited substitute for long-form writing and report drafting. Gemini at gemini.google.com is the easier pick when the draft already lives in Google Docs or Drive.

What Is the Best Free Coding Substitute Right Now?

DeepSeek’s web chat is the strongest no-paywall option, with a one-million-token context window since April. GitHub’s free Copilot tier is the better pick inside VS Code, with a monthly allowance of 2,000 completions and 50 chat messages.

Will My Saved Chat History Disappear During the Outage?

No. The data sits on OpenAI’s servers and reappears when the conversation surface restores. The visible “issues with conversations” warning is about access, not deletion.

Should I Cancel My Paid Subscription if Outages Continue?

That is a personal call. Most users get more from running two tools in parallel, a paid plan plus a free Anthropic or Google account, than from switching wholesale on a single bad day.

If the status page clears in the next hour, both surfaces slide back into the workflow and the alternatives close to a second tab. If it does not, the habit of three open AI tabs becomes the working stack.