ChatGPT down — live updates on major outage

ChatGPT is experiencing an unplanned outage affecting users in the U.S., U.K and around the world. Reports started to emerge on DownDetector and across social media at around 7am ET/ 12pm GMT with no official word from parent company OpenAI on what the cause is.

Tom's Guide has been able to verify the outage ourselves in London with the desktop version of the chatbot unable to load. Meanwhile, the app's status page states it has been "experiencing elevated error rates".

OpenAI hasn't commented publicly but the firm is clearly aware of the issue as the status page claims it is "currently investigating" the outage.

Follow this page for the latest news on this outage as it happens.

Live: Latest updates

2025-01-23T15:02:33.195Z

Charting the outage

As you can see from the DownDetector graph pictured above, reports spiked early and reached nearly 4,400 reports before falling back down again to around 1,500 continuously. DownDetector relies on user-generated reports of outages and typically sees strong spikes right into an outage as devoted users of any service provide their reports.

Many reporters are citing that ChatGPT's app version is working but the web version is still down. This is what many of the Tom's Guide team is seeing itself, with the app version loading on iOS and Android but the desktop site — on both macOS and Windows — failing to load.

2025-01-23T14:48:38.229Z

Bad gateway

Users attempting to access ChatGPT at the moment are being met with a bad gateway error, indicating the server-based issues affecting the service.

A 502 bad gateway error occurs when one server receives an invalid response from another server.

2025-01-23T14:42:01.949Z

"Continuing to work on a fix for this issue"

OpenAI has just updated the ChatGPT status page at 6.34am PT/ 9:39am ET/ 2:39pm GMT to acknowledge it is "continuing to work on a fix for this issue."

Earlier, the company added that it had "identified the root cause of this issue" and is currently "working to implement a fix".

2025-01-23T14:28:49.938Z

How many people are affected?

ChatGPT's current outage is no doubt affecting thousands if not millions of users around the world. The chatbot is available to use for free but OpenAI charges up to $200 per month for its top tier that gives users (among other things) unlimited slow video generations, 500 fast generations per month and access to higher resolution and longer clips in Sora.

According to OpenAI boss Sam Altman, ChatGPT is used weekly by more than 300 million people worldwide.