Is OpenAI API down?

Back watches the OpenAI API from your macOS menu bar and notifies you when it recovers.

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What Back watches for OpenAI API

status.openai.com

Back reads Responses and Embeddings, not the ChatGPT components. Those report on the consumer app and would give a false picture of the API. Matching on the word Chat would also catch ChatGPT Atlas and ChatGPT Work, so component names are matched exactly, not by substring.

Like most API outages, this shows up as rising error rates rather than a clean failure. The moment of recovery is the hard part to detect.

When OpenAI API 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. “OpenAI API 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 OpenAI API down right now?

Back answers that from your menu bar rather than a browser tab. It reads the Responses and Embeddings components on status.openai.com. If OpenAI API is down it checks every 20 seconds and notifies you as soon as it is usable again.

How will I know when OpenAI API is back up?

One notification: “OpenAI API 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 OpenAI API?

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.

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Stop checking OpenAI API.

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