The popular chatbot, widely used for business and personal purposes, is now back online following a brief outage that impacted thousands of users. The issue, resolved on Friday, was not accompanied by any details from the company regarding the cause of the disruption.
Users quickly took to social media, describing the access issues as “disastrous,” with many left wondering whether ChatGPT was offline. According to Down Detector, a website that monitors service outages, numerous users reported website and API issues early Wednesday morning. Some couldn’t log in, while others encountered a “bad gateway” error. Reuters reported that the outage lasted over 30 minutes at one point.
The outage affected desktop and mobile users, but the most severe problems appeared on iOS devices. Apple’s iOS 18.2 beta users could only use the new Siri integration that lets them interact with the chatbot with an OpenAI account.
A spokesperson for the company said that the outage was caused by a “server issue” and that engineers were working on a fix. Reuters reports that it impacted web and app access, with the problems occurring for about an hour.
While it’s rare for a service to go down, outages are not uncommon with large, complex tech infrastructures such as cloud hyperscalers and AI platforms. However, companies must maintain high availability for their users, primarily as they work to build the next generation of intelligent assistants.
Last night, Microsoft-backed AI startup OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT went down for a few hours. Users worldwide, including India, could not access the chatbot or its API services. The problem occurred between 8:40 AM and 9:23 AM PDT. The company has now issued a statement that the issue is fixed.
This outage came days after the company’s DevDay when it tried to entice developers to use its products. In addition to the GPT Store, which allows developers to make custom versions of the bot, the firm launched a more powerful version of its GPT-4 Turbo model that can analyze 300 pages of text at a time for half the price of previous models.
It likely added to the demand for ChatGPT, which became one of the world’s most famous AI tools after its introduction in late 2022. The platform now has over 100 million weekly active users and is used by tens of millions of developers. Last year, it partnered with Microsoft to help reduce the cost of training advanced AI algorithms. The company recently raised another $1 billion from investors, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The move will allow the non-profit to focus on marketing its AI projects.