How to check if ChatGPT, Discord, GitHub, or Cloudflare is down

"Is ChatGPT down?" "Is Discord working?" "Is GitHub having an outage?" "Is Cloudflare broken?" Some version of these four questions is asked thousands of times an hour. Each of the four has a different anatomy when it fails, and the right way to check depends on which one you're looking at.

The general method is the same for all of them: cross-reference the vendor's own status page, an independent probe, and the recent volume of user reports. The combination is far more accurate than any single signal. But the specific failure modes — and the specific red herrings — differ for each service, and worth knowing in advance.

This is the field guide for the big four. Each section gives you the official source, the most useful signals, the common false-positive patterns, and a one-click cross-reference link on StatusDetector that combines all three signals on one page.

The general method (do this for every service)

Whatever service you're checking, three signals matter:

1. The vendor's own status page — authoritative on what they've publicly admitted. Pages typically live at status.<service>.com or <service>status.com. The vocabulary is standardised: operational / minor / major / critical / maintenance. See what 'degraded performance' means for what those labels commit to.
2. An independent probe — confirms the service is reachable from outside your network. The vendor's status page can't see your specific failures; an external probe (our Website Down Checker, or any tool that probes from a third location) can confirm or rule out a problem local to you.
3. User-report volume — a leading indicator for major outages. Spikes on Down Detector and Reddit usually predate the status-page update by 10–30 minutes.

When all three agree the service is fine, it almost certainly is. When they disagree, the truth is usually closer to whichever one is showing red. The disagreement itself is useful information you can attach to a support ticket — see why official status pages sometimes lag for the structural reasons.

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

Official status: status.openai.com — Statuspage.io feed.

Our merged view: ChatGPT · Operational

What to look at

The OpenAI status page is unusually well-structured for a fast-moving product. Each component is listed separately, and the page-level indicator is usually less interesting than the component list below it. Components include:

• ChatGPT (the web product at chat.openai.com)
• API (the developer-facing API at api.openai.com)
• Labs / DALL·E (image generation)
• Sora (video generation)
• Voice mode / mobile apps

A "minor" or "major" incident usually affects one of these surfaces while the others are operational. The classic pattern: GPT-4o is degraded for two hours on the API, but ChatGPT.com keeps working because it falls back to a different model under the hood.

Common red herrings

• "ChatGPT is so slow today" without an incident on the page. Often this is a rate-limit issue specific to your account, especially on the free tier during peak hours (typically 18:00–23:00 Pacific). It's not an outage; it's load-shedding, and the status page won't reflect it.
• One conversation breaks while others work. This is almost never an outage. ChatGPT has a per-conversation context cache; a corrupted state in one chat doesn't carry across. Starting a new conversation fixes it.
• The mobile app fails but the web works. A specific mobile-only incident. The status page usually separates these but the iOS/Android pipelines can fail independently of the web pipeline.

What an actual ChatGPT outage looks like

A real incident hits at least one of: chat completions returning 500/502 for >5 minutes; the API returning rate_limit_exceeded to every request regardless of plan; messages sending but never producing output. The status page typically catches up within 10–20 minutes. The signal-to-noise ratio on Reddit's r/ChatGPT is poor during normal load and excellent during real outages.

Discord

Official status: discordstatus.com — Statuspage.io feed.

Our merged view: Discord · Operational

What to look at

Discord's status page is well-maintained and updates within 5–15 minutes of a real incident. The component breakdown matters because Discord's product is more fragmented than it looks:

• API (the bots, the desktop app, the web app — all flow through this)
• Push notifications (separate pipeline; can fail independently)
• Media proxy (image / avatar / file loading; fails often and visibly)
• Voice servers (regional; one region can fail without affecting the rest)
• Search

A partial outage that affects only voice servers in one region is the most common kind. You can join a server, send messages, see avatars — but voice chat in us-east is broken. The page reflects this accurately if you scroll down past the top banner.

Common red herrings

• A single server (guild) is broken but the rest of Discord works. This is almost always a server-specific permissions or moderation issue, not a Discord outage. Try a different server before assuming the platform is down.
• Messages aren't sending in one channel. Slow mode, rate limiting, or that channel's specific permissions. Try a DM.
• The desktop app won't connect but the web works. Almost always the desktop app's update mechanism failing locally — restart it, or clear %AppData%/discord/Cache/.

What an actual Discord outage looks like

A real Discord-wide incident: the connection indicator in the bottom-left flips to red and stays there; messages won't send anywhere; the official status page goes to minor or worse within 10 minutes. Voice-only outages are common and usually resolved within 30 minutes; full API outages are rarer and usually resolved within 60.

GitHub

Official status: githubstatus.com — Statuspage.io feed.

Our merged view: GitHub · Operational

What to look at

GitHub's product is the most surface-divided of the four — each component can fail independently, and partial outages are very common. The components on the status page are:

• Git Operations (push, pull, clone via HTTPS or SSH)
• API Requests (the REST and GraphQL APIs)
• Webhooks (delivery to external services)
• Issues, Pull Requests (the web interface for these specifically)
• Actions (CI/CD pipelines)
• Packages (npm, Docker, etc. published to ghcr.io)
• Pages (GitHub Pages hosting)
• Codespaces (cloud development environments)
• Copilot

The most common GitHub failure mode: Actions is down for 30 minutes while everything else works. Your CI pipelines fail; your repo browsing is fine. Status page accurately marks Actions as partial outage while keeping the rest green.

Common red herrings

• git push rejected, but the GitHub web UI works fine. Usually a permissions issue (branch protection, code-owner review required) or a missing 2FA token, not an outage.
• A specific Actions workflow fails repeatedly. Almost never an outage; usually a workflow-syntax issue or a third-party action that's broken.
• Slow API responses from one specific endpoint. The API has per-endpoint rate limiting; you may be hitting a per-endpoint cap that isn't reflected on the global status page.

What an actual GitHub outage looks like

Full-product GitHub outages are rare — when they happen, they're newsworthy. The far more common case is one component failing for 15–90 minutes. Watch the component list, not the page-level banner. The page will show partial outage on the affected component while the top stays at none if it's the only one affected.

Cloudflare

Official status: cloudflarestatus.com — Statuspage.io feed.

Our merged view: Cloudflare · Degraded

Why Cloudflare is the special one

Of the four, Cloudflare is unique: its outages affect a thousand other sites at once. Discord, ChatGPT, GitHub, Notion, Shopify, and millions of long-tail sites all sit behind Cloudflare's CDN. When Cloudflare has a routing incident in one of its data centres, a wide swath of the internet returns 5xx errors with Cloudflare-branded error pages — and the original site's status page usually says "operational" because the site itself is fine.

The fingerprint of a Cloudflare incident, from a user perspective:

• Multiple unrelated sites are simultaneously slow or erroring.
• The error pages mention "Cloudflare" and include a ray ID (Ray ID: 8a7e2c...).
• The status codes are usually in the Cloudflare-specific range: 520, 521, 522, 523, 524, 525, 526, 527 (the origin-side codes), or 1015, 1020 (the WAF blocked you). See Cloudflare error codes decoded for the full breakdown.

What to look at

The Cloudflare status page is granular by region. The components are:

• CDN/Cache, DNS, WAF / Bot Management, Workers / Pages / R2, each broken down by geographic region (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, etc.).

A real Cloudflare incident is usually scoped: "WAF is failing in EU-Central for 45 minutes" rather than "Cloudflare is down." The blast radius can still be enormous if your traffic happens to go through that POP.

Common red herrings

• A site behind Cloudflare returns 522. This is almost always the origin server (the actual website) having a problem — Cloudflare is reporting that it tried to talk to the origin and got nothing. The site is broken; Cloudflare itself is fine.
• A 1020 page. You've been blocked by the site's own WAF rules, not a Cloudflare outage. The site's owner has configured a rule that triggered on your traffic. VPN exit IPs and unusual user agents are common triggers.

What an actual Cloudflare outage looks like

Cloudflare-wide incidents are rare but spectacular. The 2022 Cloudflare June 21 routing incident took down a wide chunk of consumer apps for about 30 minutes; the 2023 control-plane outage made the dashboard unavailable for several hours while customer traffic mostly continued working. The fastest way to know: check our merged view at /status/cloudflare, or look at whether multiple unrelated sites you use are failing simultaneously with Cloudflare-branded error pages.

The shortcut: one search, three signals

You don't have to do the full check manually. Every service page on StatusDetector merges three signals onto one screen:

• The vendor's current official status indicator (from their Statuspage feed)
• A live HTTP probe from our infrastructure against the service's primary URL
• Recent user reports submitted to StatusDetector in the past 30 minutes

The merged view at /status/chatgpt, /status/discord, /status/github, and /status/cloudflare does the cross-reference for you. When the three agree, the conclusion is obvious. When they disagree, we explicitly say so and explain why — most often, it means the vendor's status page hasn't caught up yet.

When all three signals say "operational" but you're seeing errors

The single most useful test in this situation: try the service from a different network. Open the same URL on your phone over cellular data (not the same Wi-Fi). If it works on cellular and fails on Wi-Fi, the problem is local to your network — not the service. See is it down for everyone, or just you? for the full network-isolation walk-through.

If it also fails on cellular and the three signals all say "operational," you've found one of three patterns:

1. A region-specific or POP-specific outage that the vendor's global aggregate doesn't see. See why a website can be down in one country but working elsewhere.
2. An account-specific bug or feature flag that affects you but not the vendor's monitoring. Hard to diagnose; the right move is to file a support ticket with the exact timestamp, URL, and error message.
3. A client-side bug in your browser, an extension, or a corporate proxy. Try the URL in an incognito window, with extensions disabled. Try it on a different device.

Frequently asked

Why is my ChatGPT chat working but my coworker's isn't?

OpenAI runs gradual rollouts and a/b tests of new features, plus per-account rate limits and tier-based fallbacks to different models. The same prompt can hit a different code path for two users even when the underlying service is healthy. Differences between accounts during normal operation are common.

Discord says I'm 'connecting' forever — what's that?

The desktop app couldn't reach Discord's gateway server. Three causes in order of frequency: (1) a local network issue — try cellular; (2) a corporate firewall blocking the gateway (websocket on port 443) — try the web app, which falls back to long-polling; (3) a real Discord outage — check discordstatus.com for an Gateway incident.

GitHub Actions is stuck 'queued' — is that an outage?

Usually not. Queue depth on GitHub-hosted runners ramps up during business hours, especially Monday morning Pacific time. The status page only marks Actions degraded when the queue depth becomes excessive across the whole platform. A queued workflow for 10–15 minutes during peak load is normal, not an outage.

A Cloudflare-branded error page mentions 'Error 1020'. Is Cloudflare down?

No — 1020 is "access denied" from the site's own WAF rules, configured by the site's owner. Cloudflare is fine; the site has decided to refuse your specific request. Common triggers: VPN exit IPs, unusual user agents, geographic blocks, country bans. Turning off your VPN is the first thing to try.