Intermittent 504 Gateway Timeouts on Vector Store Create and Search APIs

API Bugs
1

@OpenAI_Support

We are currently experiencing repeated 504 Gateway Timeout errors when using the Vector Store API.
We first observed the issue at approximately 11:50 PM JST on July 23, 2026 (7:50 AM PDT on July 23, 2026), and the errors have continued to recur since then.

The issue occurs with the following endpoints:

POST /v1/vector_stores
POST /v1/vector_stores/{vector_store_id}/search

A sample search request is:

{
  "query": "CheckOut Time",
  "ranking_options": {
    "ranker": "auto",
    "score_threshold": 0.2
  },
  "rewrite_query": false,
  "max_num_results": 5
}

The error response is:

{
  "type": "https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/troubleshooting/http-status-codes/cloudflare-5xx-errors/error-504/",
  "title": "Error 504: Gateway time-out",
  "status": 504,
  "detail": "The origin web server did not respond to Cloudflare within the allowed time. This typically means the origin is overloaded or a backend process is taking too long.",
  "instance": "a1fbd383cbd1d90d",
  "error_code": 504,
  "error_name": "origin_gateway_timeout",
  "error_category": "origin",
  "ray_id": "a1fbd383cbd1d90d",
  "timestamp": "2026-07-23T15:48:08Z",
  "zone": "api.openai.com",
  "cloudflare_error": true,
  "retryable": true,
  "retry_after": 120,
  "owner_action_required": true,
  "what_you_should_do": "Wait and retry. Back off for at least 120 seconds. If the error persists, the website operator should investigate long-running processes on the origin server."
}

We have already confirmed the following:

  • GET /v1/vector_stores works successfully.

  • Vector Store creation and search fail consistently for some OpenAI projects.

  • The same requests succeed in other projects within our environment.

  • Authentication and general API connectivity appear to be working correctly.

  • Waiting for more than 120 seconds and retrying does not consistently resolve the issue.

Because the issue is project-dependent and the Cloudflare response identifies it as an origin_gateway_timeout, this appears to be a partial outage or backend issue affecting specific Vector Store project resources or shards.

Has anyone else experienced the same issue?

It would also be helpful if someone from OpenAI could confirm whether there is currently a known incident affecting Vector Store creation or search for specific projects.

We can provide the affected Organization ID, Project IDs, additional timestamps, and client request IDs privately if needed.

2

Thanks for flagging this, @s-nishihara1. The team is aware of the intermittent 504 errors and is actively working on a mitigation.

You can follow the latest updates on the OpenAI Status Page. Appreciate your patience and understanding while this is being addressed.

-Mark G.

3

We are also facing the same issue. Our application is returning the following error when using the Responses API with file uploads:

Error during prompt execution with file uploads: 504 status code (no body)

This was working previously, and there have been no recent changes on our side.

504_TimeOutIssue
504_TimeOutIssue3248×1731 484 KB

4

@OpenAI_Support

Thanks for the quick confirmation, Mark.

We’ll continue monitoring the Status Page. For reference, we first observed the issue at around 14:50 UTC, mainly affecting Vector Store creation and search, while GET requests continued to work.

Thanks again for the update.

5

Also experiencing the same when adding files to a vector store

6

@OpenAI_Support

It appears that Vector Store creation and search are now working again on our side.

Since the incident is still marked as ongoing on the Status Page, could you please confirm whether the service has been fully restored?

Thank you very much for the quick response and mitigation.

7

Thanks for the update, @s-nishihara1. It’s good to hear Vector Store creation and search are working again on your side.

We can’t confirm full restoration just yet. The service is still being monitored following the mitigation, which is why the incident remains ongoing on the Status Page. We’re hoping to see a full recovery as soon as possible.

@mohanlalranvir and @Digambar_Patil, could you also try again on your side and let us know whether it’s working now?

-Mark G.

8

thanks @OpenAI_Support I’ve tested multiple times (including high-frequency) and did not get any errors. Will try again later and let you know if anything goes wrong.

9

Getting intermittent errors while creating a vector store file:

Request:
client.vector_stores.files.create(
vector_store_id="vs_x",
file_id="file-x",
attributes={
"x": "xx",
"x": "xx",
},
)

Error response:
Error code: 500 - {
'error': {
'message': 'The server had an error while processing your request. Sorry about that!',
'type': 'server_error',
'param': None,
'code': None
}
}

10

Thanks @OpenAI_Support . The issue has been resolved for us. It’s working as expected.

11

@OpenAI_Support

We initially believed the issue had been resolved, as Vector Store creation and search started working again on our side.

However, today we sent approximately 600 requests to the Vector Store Search API, and 2 of them returned 504 errors. We had never encountered 504 errors with this API before this incident.

Could you please confirm whether the service has been fully restored, or whether intermittent errors may still be occurring?

Thank you again for your prompt response and continued work on this issue.

12

Hi @mohanlalranvir and @s-nishihara1, thanks for testing this and reporting back.

It looks like the issue has now been resolved. Could you confirm whether everything is working correctly on your end?

-Mark G.