Is ChatGPT down?
Back watches ChatGPT from your macOS menu bar and notifies you when it is back up.
What Back watches for ChatGPT
status.openai.com
OpenAI's status page lists more than twenty components, and most are not ChatGPT. Back reads Conversations and Login, the two that decide whether you can use it. An incident limited to Sora or the Ads API is not a ChatGPT outage, and Back does not report it as one.
ChatGPT problems often start at sign-in rather than in the chat, which is why Login is watched alongside Conversations.
When ChatGPT goes down, the ring in your menu bar turns red and Back tightens its checks to every 20 seconds. When it recovers you get one notification. “ChatGPT is back. You can continue working.” Nothing else. Outage alerts are off by default, so the message you get is the one you were waiting for.
Questions
Is ChatGPT down right now?
Back answers that from your menu bar rather than a browser tab. It reads the Conversations and Login components on status.openai.com. If ChatGPT is down it checks every 20 seconds and notifies you as soon as it is usable again.
How will I know when ChatGPT is back up?
One notification: “ChatGPT is back. You can continue working.” No incident report, no buttons, nothing to dismiss. Outage alerts are off by default, so the only message you get is the one you were waiting for.
Does Back monitor anything other than ChatGPT?
Yes. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, and the Anthropic and OpenAI APIs. Back Free watches one service of your choosing. Back Pro watches all of them in the order you set.
Also watched
Stop checking ChatGPT.
Install it once, choose the tool you live in, and forget it’s there until it matters.
Download for macOS Universal · macOS 14 Sonoma or later