Welcome to the community, @smartspecs, and thanks for sharing the detailed report.
There was indeed an outage affecting both the Responses API and Batch API. The team has confirmed that the fix has been applied (mentioned here), and the Status page has been updated to reflect the recovery.
For any requests still stuck in queued, creating a new request with the same payload should work. If the issue continues with newly submitted requests, please open a support ticket at support@openai.com so the team can take a closer look.
-Mark G.