The Codex Failure OpenAI's Own Status Page Does Not Show

Codex users report that the agent’s remote compaction step fails with a 401 error naming a service account key they never configured, while OpenAI‘s status page shows no outage.

Key Takeaways

An issue opened Sept. 25 in OpenAI’s own Codex repository reports remote compaction returning a 401 Unauthorized response
The rejected credential is a service account key the user said was never configured locally, pointing at the backend rather than local setup
OpenAI’s status page listed no active incident, and its most recent Codex entry is Sept. 14
Codex was named in six status incidents from Aug. 11 to Sept. 14, two of them authentication related

The fix is out of users’ hands. A key they do not control is rejected by a server they cannot reach.

What The Error Says

The report, filed in the openai/codex repository on Sept. 25, quotes the command line tool returning “Error running remote compact task: unexpected status 401 Unauthorized: Incorrect API key provided: sk-svcac***…fvMA.”

Compaction shortens a long session so work can continue past the context limit. When it fails, the session ends.

The user signs in through ChatGPT and has no API key set locally or in the environment, according to the issue. A second user on a different machine hit it at the same time.

The Status Page Shows Green

OpenAI said it was fully operational and not aware of any issues affecting its systems. Its last Codex entry, on Sept. 14, is marked recovered.

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One endpoint rejecting one credential does not register as a service-wide outage, which is how a green status page and a dead session coexist.

Six Codex Entries In Seven Weeks

Status history names Codex in six incidents from Aug. 11 to Sept. 14. The Aug. 20 entry was logged as “Elevated Codex API authentication errors”. The Sept. 3 incident covered 19 components, four of them Codex. Sept. 13 broke Codex reviews and pull requests on GitHub.

Why A 401 Is Not A Blip

A separate gateway project logged the same class of failure on Sept. 13, arguing a 401 is an authentication failure rather than a transient one, so the credential should leave rotation rather than be retried.

Small components have taken down large ones here before. A newly deployed telemetry service overwhelmed OpenAI’s Kubernetes control plane on Dec. 11, 2024 and broke ChatGPT, the API and Sora for about four hours, the company said in its postmortem.