What to Do When ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini Is Down

ChatGPT is down. Again. And of course it picked the exact moment you needed it. Short version: open status.openai.com. If it shows an incident, it is them, not you. The rest of this page is about making sure it never matters again.

Outages at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are not rare events anymore. They are a normal part of running a service that half the planet leans on. The status pages fill up with “elevated error rates” a few times a month, and every time, millions of people stare at a spinning wheel and wait. You do not have to be one of them.

Here is what the last 90 days looked like, straight from their own status pages. Two rows per provider: the app people use, and the API behind it.

Step 1: Check that it is really them, not you

Before doing anything clever, spend one minute on the boring checks. Reload the page. Try a private window, in case a browser extension is fighting the site. Try the phone app if you were on the desktop, or the other way around. If everything fails, look at the official status pages:

• ChatGPT and the OpenAI API: status.openai.com
• Claude and the Anthropic API: status.claude.com
• Gemini API and AI Studio: aistudio.google.com/status
• OpenRouter: status.openrouter.ai

One thing to know about status pages: they lag. A provider will often take twenty or thirty minutes to admit a problem that everyone on social media noticed immediately. So if the status page is green and the app is still dead, you are probably not wrong. Give it a few minutes and check again.

Step 2: Understand what is down (it is usually not everything)

Here is the part most people miss. “ChatGPT” and “the OpenAI API” are two different systems. ChatGPT is the consumer app: the website, the mobile apps, the login, the chat history, the memory, the file uploads. The API is the plumbing developers use to talk to the same models. They share the models, but not much else.

When ChatGPT goes down, it is very often the app layer that broke, not the models. The API keeps answering. The same is true of Claude versus the Anthropic API, and of the Gemini app versus the Gemini API. Read a few incident reports on those status pages and you will see it: “ChatGPT” listed as degraded, “API” listed as operational, over and over.

The table at the top of this page shows it. At OpenAI the app usually breaks alone, and the API row is much calmer. At Anthropic the two tend to go down together. That second pattern is exactly why one key is not a backup, and why the plan below uses more than one provider.

Not always, to be fair. Some outages take the whole platform down, API included. But those are the minority, and there is an answer for them too, which we will get to.

So the real question is: how do you, a normal person who does not want to write code, use the API when the app is down? That is exactly what Workspace is for.

Step 3: Have a backup that is not another subscription

The obvious backup is “also pay for Claude”. Two subscriptions, forty dollars a month, and you are still stuck on the day both have a bad afternoon, which does happen.

Workspace is a different approach. It is a chat app, free, for iPhone, iPad and Android, and it also runs directly inside WordPress. Instead of talking to ChatGPT, it talks to your own WordPress site, and your site talks to the AI providers using API keys that you own. The keys are stored in your WordPress database like any other plugin setting, and they are only ever sent to the provider you chose. Every model, your keys, your site.

That architecture is what makes it an outage-proof backup:

• Several providers at once. Add an OpenAI key, an Anthropic key, a Google key, a Mistral key, an OpenRouter key, whichever you like. They all show up in the same model picker.
• Switch mid-conversation. GPT stopped answering halfway through? Pick Claude from the model picker and send the next message. The whole history goes with it, because the history lives on your site, not at the provider. In wp-admin and on iPhone and iPad, every message keeps the model that wrote it, so you can see who said what.
• Your conversations live on your site. They are in your WordPress database, not in someone else’s account. When ChatGPT is down, your history is not down with it.
• Pay only for what you use. The app is free, the plugin is free, and the AI is billed by the provider at their published API prices, with no markup. Nobody sits in the middle.

The same insurance covers your site, by the way. If you run an AI Engine chatbot for your visitors or the copilot in your editor, each one runs on whichever provider you pick, and switching is one dropdown in the settings. Your site’s AI features do not have to go down with somebody else’s app either.

A ChatGPT Plus subscription is twenty dollars a month whether you use it or not. Through the API, with a mid-range model, a fairly active month of chatting costs a few dollars. Frontier models on long conversations cost more, and either way you see every cent in the provider’s dashboard instead of a flat fee. Most people are surprised by how small the bill is 🙂

Step 4: One key for every provider (OpenRouter)

Remember the minority of outages that take the API down too? This is where OpenRouter comes in. It is a single API that fronts hundreds of models from dozens of providers: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, DeepSeek, Qwen, Meta’s Llama, and plenty of smaller hosts, including European and Asian ones that do not live in a US data center.

One OpenRouter key in Workspace gives you all of them. Some models are served by more than one cloud there (Claude, for instance), so when a provider’s own API is struggling, the same model is sometimes still reachable through another route. And when it is not, you pick a different model from a different company and carry on. A bad day at one lab stops being your bad day.

My own setup is exactly that: a direct OpenAI key, a direct Anthropic key, and OpenRouter as the safety net. I cannot remember the last time I was actually blocked.

Is it as good as the real apps?

For the features you actually use every day, yes. Conversations you can come back to, organized in folders, pinned, searchable by title and by content. A model picker per conversation. Web search through the provider’s own search tool. Image generation from the composer, with the result saved straight into your Media Library in wp-admin and on iOS. File and image attachments for the models that support them. A prompt library for the things you ask every week. A running total of what the conversation has cost so far, in wp-admin and on iPhone and iPad.

And one thing the standard apps cannot do at all: a “This WordPress” mode that hands your site’s own tools to the model. It can search your content, read a post, fix a title, check its own work. Anything that changes the site shows you an approval card first, unless you told Workspace to always allow that tool, so nothing happens behind your back. If you run a WordPress site, that alone is a reason to open Workspace instead of ChatGPT.

What you give up: voice mode, the memory that follows you across ChatGPT conversations, custom GPTs, and the deep integrations each vendor builds into its own app. The mobile apps also trail the wp-admin version by a few features. Workspace is a very good chat client for every model. It is not a clone of any single one of them, and it does not try to be.

The ten-minute setup, before you need it

This is the practical bit, and it takes about ten minutes. Do it while everything works, because creating an API key on a provider’s dashboard is itself a thing that may not work during their outage.

1. Install AI Engine on your WordPress site. It is free, and Workspace is part of the free version, no add-on to buy. You need 3.6.8 or newer for the mobile apps. Then turn on Workspace in the Modules tab, because it is off by default.
2. Add your API keys. Go to Meow Apps > AI Engine > Settings and add an environment per provider: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, OpenRouter, or a Custom one for anything OpenAI-compatible, including a model running on your own machine.
3. Open the Workspace from the admin bar. That is the full-screen chat inside wp-admin. If you only ever use it on the desktop, you are done here.
4. Get the app on the App Store or Google Play, open the Workspace settings on your site to show a pairing QR code, and scan it. The app trades that code for a WordPress Application Password and stores it in the phone’s secure storage. With the QR code, no password is ever typed on the phone, and you can see and revoke each paired device from the same screen. On Android you can also connect manually, with your site address, your WordPress username and an Application Password.

Requirements: a self-hosted WordPress 6.0 or newer, HTTPS (WordPress refuses to issue Application Passwords over plain HTTP, and rightly so), and an administrator account. The app needs iOS 17 or Android 8. Both apps are free, with no in-app purchase.

The honest catch

• You need a WordPress site. That is the whole trick: the site is the middleman you own. If you do not have one, this article is not your backup plan.
• Your site has to be up. If your hosting goes down, Workspace goes with it. Pick decent hosting, which you should be doing anyway.
• API keys need a card on file. Each provider bills you directly. The amounts are small, but you do have to set up billing once per provider, or just once at OpenRouter.
• A single key is not a backup. The insurance only works if you connect at least two providers. One key just moves the single point of failure.
• Nobody switches for you. There is no automatic failover. When a model stops answering, you pick another one. It takes two taps, but it is a human decision, not a magic one.
• Administrators only, for now. Workspace is for the people who run the site. It is not a way to give your clients or your team a chat app.

Quick answers

Is the OpenAI API down when ChatGPT is down?

Usually not. They are separate systems that share the same models. Most ChatGPT incidents leave the API operational, which is why an API-based client keeps working. Check the “API” line on status.openai.com to confirm.

Can I use ChatGPT without a subscription?

You can use the same GPT models without a ChatGPT subscription by paying per use through the OpenAI API. Workspace gives you a normal chat interface on top of that, so you do not need to write any code.

Which AI should I use when Claude is down?

If only the Claude app is down, the Anthropic API is often still up, and Workspace will keep answering with the same model. If the whole provider is down, switch the conversation to GPT or Gemini, or route to another host through OpenRouter. The point is not which one to pick, it is having more than one connected before you need it.

Where is my data stored with Workspace?

In your own WordPress database, on your own server. The mobile app only holds a WordPress Application Password. The API keys stay on your site and are never sent to the phone.

To sum up

Check the status page, remember that the app and the API are different things, and stop depending on a single company for something you use every day. AI Engine on your site, two or three API keys, the Workspace app on your phone, and the next outage is somebody else’s problem. It costs nothing to set up and a few dollars a month to use, and it is honestly a nicer way to work with these models even on the days when nothing is broken 😉