ChatGPT Hit by Elevated Errors on August 27, With Users Reporting Unusual Internal Tokens

ChatGPT experienced a period of elevated errors on August 27, 2026, affecting ChatGPT Work services on web and mobile. According to OpenAI’s official status history, the company identified elevated errors affecting the impacted services and began implementing a mitigation.

The disruption also prompted reports from users outside the official status channel. A post on the r/ChatGPT community described unusual responses in which the internal-looking string <|SpawnThinking|> reportedly became visible. The post claimed that similar behavior was observed by some users in regular ChatGPT conversations, including on mobile, although these reports should be treated as anecdotal rather than confirmation of the incident’s technical cause.

OpenAI’s public status information confirms the service degradation but does not establish that the reported internal token exposure was directly caused by the same underlying issue. The company’s status history shows that elevated-error incidents have also affected other ChatGPT features during August, including Thinking mode and conversations for Free users, highlighting how failures can sometimes be limited to particular products, plans or features rather than the entire platform.

For users, the August 27 episode appears to have been a temporary service reliability problem rather than evidence of a newly announced ChatGPT feature or model release. The most reliable place to verify ongoing disruptions remains the official OpenAI Status page, while community reports can provide useful early signals of unusual behavior that may not yet be fully documented.