There is an issue with the Phone Number Verification for Malaysian Phone Numbers

On 25 April, OpenAI posted a notice on its status page flagging that phone number verification was failing for Malaysian numbers. That post remains the entire public record. No root cause. No estimated fix window. No follow-up notice confirming resolution. That last part matters more than it might seem — when platforms resolve something cleanly, they almost always close the loop publicly. OpenAI has not done that, which means either the fix is still in progress, or the issue quietly disappeared without anyone updating the record. Neither possibility is reassuring.

If confirmed, here is what this means. Phone number verification is not a cosmetic feature — it is the front door for account creation and two-factor authentication. Malaysian users who cannot complete verification are effectively locked out of new account registration entirely, and potentially locked out of security workflows on existing accounts. The practical consequence is that a non-trivial population of users in a growing Southeast Asian tech market cannot access a platform they may depend on professionally. The secondary effect is subtler but worth watching: when verification infrastructure breaks along national lines, it raises questions about how regional phone number databases are maintained and tested. Malaysia is not an edge case — it is a country of 33 million people with strong developer and enterprise adoption of AI tools. Treating it like one suggests a gap in how OpenAI validates geographic coverage before pushing infrastructure changes.

Watch for an update on OpenAI's status page either confirming resolution with a timestamp, or — more tellingly — nothing at all, which would suggest the issue persists without public acknowledgement.

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