ChatGPT falls into a massive outage – the latest updates from OpenAI

No news is necessarily good news

While the team at OpenAI is apparently hard at work trying to figure out why ChatGPT doesn’t work, the rest of us are still in the dark. The company’s website still lists “Investigating” as the status. The last update was posted at 10:33 ET, so it’s about time OpenAI gave us something.

On Down Detector, the amount of reports seems to have dropped dramatically, with only 745 reports coming in as of 12:51 pm ET.

OpenAI hasn’t posted anything on X since May 30, so the company is still quiet outside of its status website.

With Perplexity and Claude also having problems, it looks like Google Gemini is your best bet if you need to do anything with generative AI today, although there have been scattered reports of issues with Google’s tool as well. This is likely due to increased demand.

Complexity AI also has problems

The issues keep coming. First, there was ChatGPT, and then Claude started seeing users all over the web reporting problems. Now, Perplexity is starting to have problems. Around 11:40 a.m. ET, users began reporting problems with Perplexity’s website and app.

Based on the posts seen on X, it appears that users are getting an error that Perplexity is “receiving too many questions right now.” The error also says that they have “reached capacity. Please check back soon.” This could mean that Perplexity’s problems stem from more users jumping onto its platform without access to ChatGPT.

For its part, ChatGPT is still out of business with no end in sight. OpenAI’s website and Down Detector are still showing user issues, so we’ll have to keep monitoring the status of the beloved AI tool.

Claude also seems to have problems

Claude 3 from Anthropic, one of the best alternatives to ChatGPT also seems to have issues today. Her website presents an error and is mostly offline.

The first issues with Claude 3 started showing up about an hour ago and seem to be sporadic, not constantly offline like ChatGPT.

Up and down all day

According to the detector below, the first reports came in of a new problem around 10:00 a.m. ET, increasing rapidly over the next hour. The vast majority are related to ChatGPT, but there are website and app issues as well.

The new outage came about three hours after services appeared to be back to normal for OpenAI.

Both disruptions led to jokes in X that humans will suddenly have to start using their brains or thinking for themselves, and not just leave it to AI.

If you don’t want to think for yourself, we have a guide to the best ChatGPT alternatives.

ChatGPT goes down again

Looks like ChatGPT is up and running again. Reports of a new outage started appearing on X and DownDetector and have since been confirmed by OpenAI.

The company is reporting it as a new outage, not a continuation of the previous one, and says “we are investigating the matter.”

I first noticed the problem when I tried to use ChatGPT Voice’s new Background Chat feature on mobile. This allows you to talk to AI even when you are not in ChatGPT – then ChatGPT works.

What went wrong?

It is not clear what caused the extended outage today. OpenAI has remained tight-lipped, not posting on social media or responding to media requests for comment.

It’s not unusual for a major consumer product to have an extended outage, the Meta has suffered them several times in recent years. The cause could be anything from a malicious attack to human error.

OpenAI is in the process of increasing availability ahead of a much-rumored deal with Apple to bring ChatGPT to millions of new devices. It’s also close to deploying its compute-hungry GPT-4o Voice feature that runs speech-to-speech for natural conversations.

This, combined with the increased demand due to making most of its features free, may have contributed to a server overload. We won’t know for sure until OpenAI decides to share the cause — if they do.

Apple has eyes on OpenAI

OpenAI is expected to announce a deal with Apple at WWDC next week. This is likely to see deep integration between OpenAI products and the Apple ecosystem.

With that will come greater demand for servers that also power ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot family of AI products. These servers are actually run by Microsoft through its Azure cloud platform.

Mar Spoonauer, global editor-in-chief of Tom’s Guide predicts that this will have a big impact on the iPhone and especially on Siri’s performance.

“The bottom line is that iOS 18 and Siri are about to get smarter with the help of OpenAI, assuming this deal is legit and will be announced at WWDC next week,” he wrote.

“All normal systems”

OpenAI reports that all systems are back to normal. While the company has yet to release a statement, its system status page is reporting the all clear.

According to the website, the outage lasted a total of two hours and 45 minutes, but in reality there were problems for about four hours.

I’ve asked OpenAI for a comment on the cause, but have yet to receive a response.

ChatGPT is back for some users

Some users – myself included – have started regaining access to ChatGPT. I’ve tried it on web, desktop and iPhone and it seems to be back to normal.

However, a number of users are still reporting problems and OpenAI’s status page still says it’s unavailable for some users.

I asked ChatGPT for a summary of what happened – now has live internet access – and it amounted to a DDoS attack. None of the source links he used to suggest it was the cause mention DDoS at all.

OpenAI has not given a reason for the shutdown.

Best ChatGPT Alternatives

ChatGPT is an incredibly impressive platform, with access to custom chatbots, image generation, code generation, and the GPT-4o template — it’s one of the best.

However, there are dozens of AI chatbots on the market, and while some are simply wrappers for GPT-4 or GPT-4o, platforms like Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude stand alone as direct competitors with their own capabilities and features.

I’ve put together a guide to the best ChatGPT alternatives and what they’re best used for. If you’re looking I suggest Perplexity, if you want a friendly chat try Pi and if you’re a big X fan get into Grok.

Possible causes for the outage

OpenAI hasn’t said what caused the outage, though some users suggested spotting hints of a new model in the dropdown menu when things started to go wrong.

Some of the issues may be caused by increased server load due to rolling out more advanced features to all ChatGPT users, including those with a free account.

With Apple’s deal likely to be announced at WWDC next week, they might as well have expanded capacity before they have to take questions from the billion iPhones.

A fix has been implemented

OpenAI says it has implemented a fix, but has not said what caused the outage that has now lasted more than four hours.

There have been only four updates from the ChatGPT manufacturer regarding the outage in its flagship product. The last one simply says: “Monitoring – An adjustment has been made and we are monitoring the results”.

I tried it on the web and was able to gain access but it doesn’t respond and I had to reload several times.

Users took to X to share thoughts on the hiatus, including the idea that “HE needs a mental health break too.”

Many of the comments were about the number of posts on X showing people turning to the platform to find out if ChatGPT really does not work.

You’ve also had memes about people suddenly having to think for themselves, now HE isn’t there to do it for them.

Platform wide issue

The problem appears to be across the entire OpenAI platform, with issues reported around the API used in third-party apps as well as ChatGPT.

The latest update to the OpenAI ChatGPT status page saw the alert turn from amber to red with the title “ChatGPT is unavailable for some users”. Although the current outage seems to be quite widespread.

ChatGPT has more than 100 million active users worldwide. This is the first major disruption since OpenAI made many of its previously paid features free.

The update also brought GPT-4o, the powerful multimodal AI model announced during the Spring Update to free ChatGPT users.

OpenAI also made its custom GPT library and those made by developers available to subscribers for free and the ability to run code and analyze data.