File Search Still Broken - Day 4 of Production Outage

API Bugs
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1

It’s been 3+ days since this started (Sept 7th) and my production systems are still completely broken.

What’s happening:

  • Assistant API file search returns “I couldn’t find any specific sections in uploaded files” for literally everything

  • Responses API having the same issue

  • Even the ChatGPT web interface can’t search files properly

  • Vector stores seem totally borked - can’t even delete files

What I’ve tried:

  • Switching between gpt-4o and gpt-4.1 (some people said this worked but not for me)

  • Re-uploading files

  • Different file formats

  • Praying to the API gods :folded_hands:

This is hitting hard - clients are asking questions, deadlines are approaching, and I’m basically explaining why our “AI-powered” solution suddenly can’t read documents anymore.

@OpenAI_Support - any ETA on a fix? Even just updating the status page would help us explain to stakeholders that this isn’t our fault.

Anyone else still experiencing this or found a reliable workaround?

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2

I had to move my critical file operations over to Anthropic for the time being, unfortunately. Way too unstable in OpenAI the last couple weeks.

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3

does it support all the file types like pdf, text, ppt, csv, doc etc.

4

Unfortunately no, it prefers pdf so I had to do a file conversion before the API call isn’t pdf. Not ideal but had to get something working.

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Hi @hsgaurav, are you still blocked here? We had a File Search outage that should now be resolved:

Let me know!

6

It’s solved now Thanks for the update!

7

@vc-openai We have this same issue!! We have had NO success with File Search in Responses API since last Thursday, Sept 11th! We know it says service restored - but it still is not working for us. How can we do production work and recommend OpenAI solutions to clients with stability issues like this? Can you please help?

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8

@RHorwitz is it still not working for you?

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9

We wound up changing the API key we used and that seems to have resolved the issue. Thanks for the follow up!

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