ChatGPT ends in massive outage – latest update from OpenAI

No news is necessarily good news

While the team at OpenAI is probably trying hard to figure out why ChatGPT is down, the rest of us are still in the dark. The company’s website still lists the status as “Investigation”. The last update was posted at 10:33AM ET, so it’s about time OpenAI gave us something.

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

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

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

AI perplexity also has problems

The problems keep coming. First it was ChatGPT and then Claude started seeing users across the sites reporting issues. Now, Perplexity is starting to have problems. Around 11:40 a.m. ET, users began reporting problems with the Perplexity website and app.

Based on the posts seen in X, it seems that users are getting an error that Perplexity is “currently receiving a lot of questions”. The error also says that they have “reached capacity. Please come back soon.” This could mean that Perplexity’s problems stem from more users jumping to its platform without access to ChatGPT.

ChatGPT is still down with no end in sight. The OpenAI and Down Detector websites are still showing user issues, so we’ll have to continue to monitor the status of the popular AI tool.

Claude seems to be in trouble as well

Anthropic’s Claude 3, one of the best alternatives to ChatGPT, also seems to be in trouble today. His website is reporting an error and is largely offline.

The first problems with Claude 3 started about an hour ago and seem to be sporadic, not consistently offline like ChatGPT.

Up and down all day

According to the descent detector, the first reports of the new problem came in at about 10:00 a.m. ET and grew very quickly over the next hour. The vast majority are related to ChatGPT, but there are also issues with websites and apps.

The new outage came about three hours after services for OpenAI appeared to have returned to normal.

Both outages led to jokes on X about humans suddenly having to start using their brains or thinking for themselves and not just leaving it up to AI.

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

ChatGPT is down again

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

The company is reporting this as a new outage, not a continuation of the previous one, and says that “we are currently investigating this issue.”

I first noticed the problem when trying to use ChatGPT Voice’s new Background Chat feature on mobile. It lets you talk to the AI ​​even when you’re not in ChatGPT – that’s when 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 uncommon for a large consumer product to have extended outages, Meta has suffered several 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 heavily rumored deal with Apple that will bring ChatGPT to millions of new devices. It is also close to launching its compute-intensive GPT-4o Voice feature, which triggers speech-to-speech conversion for natural conversation.

This, combined with the increasing demand to release most features for free, may have contributed to server overload. We won’t know for sure until OpenAI decides to share the cause — if ever.

Apple has its eyes on OpenAI

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

With that comes more demand for servers that also power ChatGPT and Microsoft’s AI Copilot family of products. These servers are actually operated 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 specifically on Siri performance.

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

“All systems normal”

OpenAI reports that all systems are back to normal. Although the company has yet to issue a statement, its system status page reports that 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 almost four hours.

I’ve asked OpenAI for 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 the web, on my computer and on my iPhone and it seems to be back to normal.

However, a number of users are still reporting issues, and the OpenAI status page still states that it is unavailable for some users.

I asked ChatGPT for a breakdown of what happened – it now has live internet access – and it came up with the fact of a DDoS attack. None of the source links he used indicated that this was the cause, it doesn’t mention DDoS at all.

OpenAI did not give a reason for the outage.

The best ChatGPT alternatives

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

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

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

Possible causes of the outage

OpenAI didn’t say what caused the outage, though some users suggested that the dropdown menu showed hints of a new model when things started to go wrong.

Some of the issues may be due to 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 been expanding capacity before having to take inquiries from billions of iPhones.

The fix has been implemented

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

There have been only four updates from the maker of ChatGPT about the outage of its flagship product. The latest simply says “Monitoring – The fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.”

I tried it on the website and was able to access it but it is unresponsive and I had to reload several times.

Users took to X to share thoughts on the outage, including the idea that “even AI needs a mental health break.”

Many of the comments were about the number of posts on X showing people turning to the platform to find out if ChatGPT is really down.

You also had memes around people suddenly having to think for themselves, now there’s no AI to do it for them.

A broad platform problem

The issue 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 on the OpenAI ChatGPT status page saw a notification color change from orange to red with the title “ChatGPT is unavailable for some users”. Although the actual outage appears to be fairly widespread.

ChatGPT has more than 100 million active users worldwide. This is the first major outage since OpenAI made many previously paid features available for free.

The update also included the launch of GPT-4o, a powerful multi-modal AI model announced during the spring update for free ChatGPT users.

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