For the past few hours, all of my background requests have been taking several minutes to return a response. I checked the API Status page and everything looks normal. I also contacted OpenAI Support, but the only explanation I got was “variable latency”, which hasn’t been very helpful.
At first I assumed it might be related to queueing, so I switched the project to the Priority tier, but it didn’t improve anything. With time passing if anything, it seems even worse…
Non-background requests are working fine, but my entire pipeline relies on sequential backend processing, which is why I use background mode + webhooks.
Is anyone else experiencing this issue with background requests right now?
When you say background requests, do you mean the lower cost “Batch” API calls? Or regular API calls? Do you have a code snippet that shows the setup and execution of the API call?
On the Responses API, you don’t have to keep a connection open and wait for the output or the stream, or get nothing if the connection closes. You can use “background” parameter to immediately close the connection after it is ingested.
To obtain the response, you can either poll the status of the response ID, or can subscribe to a webhook to know when to check.
Should OpenAI be charging the same and the parameter gives you terrible service? Absolutely not.
One should compare the latency of the model vs a normal API request, to see if the observation is true and repeatable, because gpt-5 simply thinks for way longer than anyone could expect.