Long-standing partners OpenAI and Microsoft both reported outages affecting key products on Monday, though there has been no indication that the two incidents are connected. OpenAI stated that its enterprise-grade AI agent, ChatGPT Work, has been experiencing high error rates and latency for roughly three hours. Meanwhile, Microsoft confirmed problems with its Exchange Online service.

On its status page, OpenAI said: "Users across multiple subscription plans may be unable to start or continue tasks in ChatGPT Work. We are continuing to implement mitigations." As of 2:24 PM Eastern Time on Monday, the outage tracking website Downdetector had logged more than 1,100 user reports regarding issues with OpenAI's products. Shortly thereafter, reports for Microsoft Outlook approached 4,600. Both platforms saw their respective outage reports peak earlier in the day.

The ChatGPT account for OpenAI posted on X: "ChatGPT Work is currently unavailable. We apologize and are fixing it!" In July of this year, OpenAI launched ChatGPT Work, an enterprise-level agent tool designed to compete directly with Anthropic's Claude Cowork. The agent is built to assist employees with more "ambitious tasks," such as creating polished presentations, web applications, spreadsheets, documents, and executing other complex projects.

Microsoft first invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, giving the software giant an early foothold in the AI sector, which came three years before the release of ChatGPT. That investment later grew to $13 billion as the strategic relationship deepened, but recently the two firms have begun competing across multiple areas.

Through its 365 status account on X, Microsoft stated: "We have confirmed users may encounter degraded performance while using various Exchange Online features. We are reviewing service telemetry and diagnostic data to isolate the root cause of the issue."