ChatGPT can’t make images right now. OpenAI confirmed an outage on Monday, July 27, 2026.
Ask the chatbot for a picture today, and you’ll likely get an error instead. “Image generation unavailable in ChatGPT.”
The company added a short update on its Status Page: “We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services.”
What ChatGPT users are seeing
Instead of an image, many users get a message like this one: “I’m sorry, but I was unable to generate the image because of a technical error with the image system.”
That response points to a technical outage, not a content restriction. And OpenAI has confirmed the outage itself through its own status page.
Separately, some users have raised complaints on OpenAI’s developer forum about image requests getting blocked over content guidelines. Those posts describe policy-based refusals, though, not Monday’s outage.
An earlier outage this month was different
This isn’t the first ChatGPT image hiccup this month. Mint reported a broader outage on July 7, 2026, that also knocked out access to past chats.
OpenAI used nearly identical language back then, too. The company told Mint it was “implementing mitigation” during that earlier incident.
Still, nothing in the available reporting ties the July 7 outage to Monday’s problem. Reports described Monday’s issue simply as a partial outage hitting image generation in ChatGPT.
What’s confirmed so far
OpenAI hasn’t given a specific cause for Monday’s outage.
For now, users just know one thing for certain: ChatGPT can’t generate images, and OpenAI says a fix is still being rolled out.
