ChatGPT Experiences Extended Global Outage Affecting Thousands
ChatGPT, the widely-used AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, has been offline for more than five hours, leaving thousands of users across the globe unable to access its services. Reports indicate the disruption began around noon, with many users facing persistent errors and interruptions.
Widespread Impact and User Complaints
According to status monitoring platforms, more than 800 users in India alone have reported issues accessing ChatGPT. Some users encounter constant network errors, while others see the interface load but fail to receive any AI responses. The problem doesn’t just affect the chatbot interface but extends to various platforms including desktop, mobile apps, and third-party services relying on OpenAI’s APIs.
OpenAI Acknowledges the Problem
The company behind ChatGPT has publicly confirmed the outage on its status page, stating that certain users are experiencing elevated error rates and increased latency across multiple services including its APIs, ChatGPT itself, and the text-to-video generation model, Sora. Paid subscribers using these services have reported issues for over 30 minutes. While OpenAI is actively investigating, there has been no indication yet on when full service will resume.
Recurring Technical Issues This Month
This disruption marks the second significant outage ChatGPT users have faced recently. Earlier this month, the service briefly went down, and just days ago, minor search-related software glitches were reported, but quickly resolved. The current outage, which has persisted for over five hours, could be the longest in ChatGPT’s operational history to date.
Users Express Frustration and Humor Online
Online reactions to the outage have ranged from frustration to humor. Many have taken to social media platforms, sharing memes, expressing disappointment, and checking if others face similar problems. Some users complain that both desktop and mobile apps are effectively unusable, with constant network errors disrupting any attempts at interaction.
- "The ChatGPT app on my iPhone is genuinely unusable, constantly throwing network errors," one user mentioned.
- Another shared a simple yet telling reaction: "Me when ChatGPT is down: 😔😣"
What’s Next?
As OpenAI works to identify and resolve the cause of this extensive downtime, users worldwide remain unable to access one of the most popular AI chatbots. Continued updates are expected as the situation develops.
Stay tuned for updates as this story unfolds.
