How does this ChatGPT outage compare?

ChatGPT isn’t exactly immune to outages, but this is looking like the biggest and longest one of the year. The last really serious one was just over a year ago in May 2023, when the service was down for around eight hours. 

While there are some signs of ChatGPT returning its old self, we’re approaching five hours since issues were first reported – and OpenAI’s status page continues to show a major incident that’s leaving the service “unavailable for some users”. 

More recently, we also saw ChatGPT go briefly off the rails, with users reporting an array of confusing and even threatening responses from the bot. Even chatbots have bad days, it seems…

Signs of life!

Today’s ChatGPT issues appear to mostly be affecting logged-in users – that’s still most people, though, as OpenAI is still rolling out the option of using the service instantly without logging in (which it announced in April).

But it looks like the problems are slowly getting resolved. We’re now seeing full access to the latest GPT-4o model on our Plus account (via web browser) and in the mobile app.

Downdetector is also again seeing a drop in reports following a second spike earlier. All we need now is for OpenAI to give us the good news with a more promising status update…

Millions hit by the ChatGPT outage

ChatGPT may not be used regularly by the average person, according to a fascinating new study from the Reuters Institute and Oxford University, but millions still rely on it for coding, brainstorming, writing reports and more.

The service has around 180 million active users worldwide, and rocketed to 100 million users during its breakout first year from late 2022. Those who do use ChatGPT regularly have made the tool a key part of their workflow, which is why this increasingly lengthy outage is proving particularly painful.

There are still no further updates from OpenAI’s status page, over an hour since it said it was “continuing to work on a fix” for the issue.   

Three hours and counting…

The number of ChatGPT users reporting the outage on Downdetector appears to be dropping in the US and UK, though there still isn’t any sign of an official fix over three hours since the issues started. We’re still unable to use the service on the web or mobile app.

OpenAI hasn’t yet commented on the issue, but it’ll be interesting to hear about the cause when it does. Last year in November 2023, following a similar ChatGPT outage, OpenAI said it was down to “an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack”.

There’s no suggestion that this is the case today, but that previous outage occurred during an unstable period for ChatGPT that saw it go down twice over two days –ChatGPT fans will be hoping that isn’t the case again.

In the meantime…

The ChatGPT outage appears to be worldwide, with reports on X (formerly Twitter) suggesting it’s down for many in the US, UK, France, New Zealand and many more countries.

While we wait for OpenAI’s engineers get under ChatGPT’s hood and fix the issues, maybe it’s time to browse through the best ChatGPT alternatives. Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot must be enjoying the outage – and we wonder how many people today have signed up to Claude 3 to give it a spin…

No quick fix, it seems

OpenAI’s latest update suggests that the ChatGPT issues aren’t proving to be an easy fix – its status page has gone from orange to red, and it says “we are continuing to work on a fix for this issue”.

There’s still no direct word from OpenAI on what the cause is, but we should find out soon hopefully. Otherwise everyone will have to start using, shock, pre-ChatGPT tools for brainstorming and coding.

What’s causing the issues?

OpenAI hasn’t yet committed on what’s causing today’s ChatGPT’s problems, though it currently looks like a simple server outage. 

Most users are either unable to access the website in a browser – we’re getting a “bad gateway” response – or are simply unable to send messages in the web or app versions.

The ChatGPT status page says the issue is still unresolved, so it’s time for rival chatbot users like Copilot to start gloating.

OpenAI has “identified the issue”

While there’s been no word from OpenAI on social media about the ChatGPT issues, its status page now says that it’s “identified the issue and mitigating” (as of 1.32PDT).

In theory, then, a fix shouldn’t be too far away, although the reports on Downdetector have continued to spike in the UK (but appear to be stabilizing in the US).

When did the ChatGPT problems start?

According to Downdetector, the first reports of a ChatGPT outage started around two hours ago at 2.30am ET / 7.30am BDT / 4.30pm AEST.

At their peak, there were around 2,300 reports of issues in the US and around 1,000 in the UK, a not insignificant number which suggests that a significant proportion of users are unable to use the service.

We’re currently unable to use ChatGPT in either the web browser or iOS mobile app, with the latter returning an “internal server error”.