ChatGPT Outage Disrupts Users of the Most Popular Gen AI Tool

AI chatbot ChatGPT on Tuesday experienced a pair of outages.

In a statement on the OpenAI status page time stamped at 7:33 a.m. PT, the startup said ChatGPT was unavailable for some users and that it was investigating the issue. At 10:17 a.m. PT, it posted that the problem had been resolved.

"We experienced a major outage impacting all users on all plans of ChatGPT," the company said on its status site. "The impact included all ChatGPT related services. The impact did not include platform.openai.com or the API."

It's unclear what caused the problem, but we've reached out to OpenAI for comment and will update this story when the company responds. 

Since it first rolled out in November 2022, ChatGPT has taken the world by storm with its generative AI capabilities, which offer the potential to upend creativity, work and more for over 150 million users. It's inspired a wave of competitors, and their battle for relevancy remains ongoing.

The outage that was just resolved actually marked ChatGPT's second outage of the day. The first was flagged at 12:21 a.m. PT. OpenAI said it identified the issue about an hour later and implemented a fix as of 4:19 a.m. PT. It reported the incident as resolved as of 4:45 a.m. PT.

It's been a bumpy few weeks for generative AI companies. News of OpenAI's outage follows the relative implosion of Google's AI Overviews, a new search experience that was widely mocked — and then scaled back — after it told consumers to eat glue and rocks.

Just a few weeks earlier, both Google and OpenAI debuted new gen AI models to much fanfare. OpenAI has also been busy signing deals with social media platforms and media companies to boost access to real-time data.