ChatGPT Suffers Major Outage
Service Restored After Hours of Downtime
Earlier today, ChatGPT, the widely used generative AI platform developed by OpenAI, experienced a significant outage, affecting millions of users worldwide. The issue, which began around 2:30 AM ET, was acknowledged by OpenAI and led to a disruption in services for several hours. As of 3 PM ET, OpenAI reported that "All Systems Operational," indicating that the service had been fully restored.
Timeline of the Outage
Reports of issues with ChatGPT started early in the morning at approximately 2:30 AM ET / 7:30 AM BDT / 4:30 PM AEST on June 4. OpenAI quickly acknowledged the problem, with their status page confirming that ChatGPT was unavailable. A fix was initially pushed out at around 7:30 AM ET / 12:30 PM BST / 4:30 PM AEST, temporarily restoring the service. However, this fix soon failed, leading to further complaints from users who were unable to access the AI.
Despite multiple attempts to resolve the issue, the outage persisted for nearly eight hours. OpenAI confirmed that the service was back to normal and fully operational by 5:01 PM GMT.
User Reactions
The outage impacted a substantial number of users, with Downdetector logging around 2,300 reports of issues in the US and 1,000 in the UK at the peak of the disruption. Users reported encountering "bad gateway" errors and being unable to send messages through the web or app versions of ChatGPT.
The extended downtime was particularly challenging for users who rely on ChatGPT for various tasks, including coding, brainstorming, and writing reports. The platform's 180 million active users worldwide found the outage especially disruptive, highlighting the dependency on such AI tools in daily workflows.
OpenAI's Response and Current Status
While OpenAI has restored ChatGPT, the company has not yet provided detailed information about the cause of the outage. Previous disruptions, such as one in November 2023, were attributed to abnormal traffic patterns indicative of a DDoS attack. There is no indication that a similar cause is behind today's issues.
OpenAI's status page provided updates throughout the day, moving from an initial "identified the issue and mitigating" status to a full resolution. Despite this, many users continued to experience problems until the final fix was implemented.
Looking Forward
OpenAI has advised users who are still experiencing issues to perform a hard reset on their browsers or apps to restore functionality. While the immediate crisis appears to be over, the incident underscores the need for robust contingency plans for those who heavily depend on AI tools.
