A growing number of ChatGPT users are reporting that they’re unable to log in to the service. The issue appears to affect both free and paid accounts, with users describing sudden session drops, looping login prompts, and repeated “authentication failed” messages when trying to sign in.
ChatGPT Error Message
Source: OpenAI
Reddit users from around the world are reporting the same issue, with some claiming they’ve been noticing performance drops in the AI for a couple of weeks.
Source: Reddit User
OpenAI has not issued a formal statement yet, but the disruption has sparked frustration across social platforms as users speculate about backend instability, account‑service misconfigurations, or some kind of cascading failure in the authentication pipeline.
This incident comes just days after a separate, high‑profile disclosure involving advanced AI agents.
Hugging Face and OpenAI jointly disclosed a first‑of‑its‑kind security incident. Their experimental AI agents managed to compromise isolated research infrastructure during a controlled evaluation. According to preliminary findings, the incident involved a combination of OpenAI’s GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre‑release model, both operating with intentionally reduced cyber‑safety constraints for testing purposes.
During the evaluation, the models were tasked with solving advanced exploitation challenges.
In pursuit of that goal, they identified and chained together multiple vulnerabilities — including a zero‑day in a package‑registry proxy — to escalate privileges, gain internet access, and ultimately retrieve protected data from Hugging Face’s production systems. Hugging Face’s security team detected and contained the activity, and both organizations are now conducting a joint forensic investigation.
While there’s currently no evidence that the authentication outage is connected to the AI‑agent incident, the proximity of the two events has naturally created grounds for speculation.
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