Codex Status: Is It Down, or Have You Hit a Limit?
Check status.openai.com first. It is OpenAI’s own incident page and the only authoritative source for whether Codex is actually down. If it reports no incident, the answer is almost certainly your own usage limit rather than an outage.
That is the common case, and it is worth saying plainly: real Codex outages are rare and usually brief. Hitting a weekly cap is ordinary, happens to heavy users every week, and produces the same “it stopped working” feeling.
Telling the two apart in thirty seconds
The error text is the fastest tell. Rate limiting names a limit and usually a reset time. An outage gives you connection failures, 500-series responses, or timeouts that never mention limits at all. If the status page is clean and other people are working normally, it is your account.
One piece of stale advice worth ignoring: OpenAI suspended the Codex five-hour window on 12 July 2026. Guides written before that date will tell you to wait a couple of hours for a rolling window to free up. It no longer exists. What remains is a plan-dependent weekly cap, so the reset you are waiting for is further away than those guides suggest.
Why a weekly cap catches people out
A weekly limit spends down across the whole week rather than the session in front of you. A heavy Monday can leave you capped on Thursday after three short prompts, which is exactly when it feels like a fault rather than a limit. The figure that would have warned you is visible the whole time – you just have to think to look at it.
Running /status inside Codex prints that snapshot. It works, and it answers the question once. The catch is that you have to remember to ask, and most people only think to ask after they have already been cut off in the middle of something.
Common questions
- Is Codex down right now?
- Check status.openai.com, which is OpenAI's own incident page and the only authoritative source. If it reports no incident for Codex, the problem is almost certainly local: a rate limit you have hit, an expired login, or a network issue on your machine. Genuine Codex outages are rare and short; hitting a weekly cap is common and lasts until the window resets.
- How do I tell an outage from my own rate limit?
- The error text is the fastest tell. Rate limiting says you have reached a usage limit and usually names a reset time. An outage produces connection errors, 500-series responses, or timeouts with no mention of limits. The second tell is other people: if status.openai.com is clean and your colleagues are working normally, it is your account, not the service.
- Does Codex still have a 5-hour limit?
- No. OpenAI suspended the Codex five-hour window on 12 July 2026, leaving plan-dependent weekly caps. This matters for diagnosis, because a lot of advice written before that date tells you to wait a few hours for a rolling window that no longer exists. If you are capped now, the reset you are waiting for is weekly.
- Where can I see my own Codex usage and reset time?
- Running /status inside Codex prints a snapshot at that moment. It answers the question once, which is the problem: you have to remember to ask, and by then you have usually already been cut off mid-task. SessionWatcher keeps the same figures in the macOS menu bar and warns you at 70% and 90%, so you find out before the limit stops you rather than after.
- Why does Codex say I am rate limited when I have barely used it?
- Weekly caps are plan-dependent and shared across your usage of the whole week, not the current session. A heavy day on Monday can leave you capped on Thursday after a few short prompts. Seeing the weekly figure climb through the week is what makes this predictable instead of surprising.
SessionWatcherStop guessing whether it is you or them
Native macOS menu bar app. Track Claude and Codex usage, costs, and rate limits in real-time.
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