Is ChatGPT Down? Users Report Problems With OpenAI Product

15 hours ago 4

What's New

There has been a spike in OpenAI outages across the country since 1:25 p.m. EST, according to Downdetector.

Why It Matters

As of 1:55 p.m. EST, the outages tracking website, showed that there were over 15,000 reports of OpenAI not working with a majority, 92 percent, saying the problems were directly related to ChatGPT. The live outage map shows issues occurring across the country, with hotspots in major cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas and Tampa. The largest concentration of outages seems to be in New York City.

Newsweek reached out to OpenAI for comment.

"We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue," OpenAI said through an update on its error page at 3:06 p.m. EST.

An hour after the first major spike of outages, at 2:55 p.m. EST, about 5,000 customers reported they are still experiencing an issue with the OpenAI services.

Why is ChatGPT Not Working?

The issue, according to OpenAI's alert at 2:18 p.m. EST, seems to be caused by an "upstream provider." It is affecting the use of ChatGPT, the API and Sora.

When Did the ChatGPT Outage Begin?

The organization first recognized the issue at 1 p.m. EST.

CEO Sam Altman has not posted to his X, formerly known as Twitter, account about the issue. The OpenAI and ChatGPT X accounts have also not posted.

What To Know

Altman's biggest and most lucrative venture is OpenAI. First pitched as a nonprofit initiative meant to create artificial intelligence, OpenAI has since pivoted to a commercial enterprise, with the backing of Microsoft. Still private, the company is estimated to be worth more than $80 billion, according to Forbes reporting on an offer for employee shares.

On November 30, 2022, OpenAI debuted ChatGPT, a chatbot and virtual assistant based on large language models (LLMs). GPT stands for generative pretrained transformer, which allows the application to have reinforcement learning from human feedback.

ChatGPT has been credited as a major tool in starting the AI race between a number of tech companies, spurring the release of similar products like Google's Gemini, X's Grok, Microsoft's Copilot and Meta's Llama.

By January 2023, ChatGPT had gained over 100 million users.

Later that year, in a move that made headlines, OpenAI's board ousted Altman as CEO, claiming that he "was not consistently candid in his communications." He was reinstated a few days later after the company's employees revolted and threatened to quit over the move.

What People Are Saying

OpenAI in an alert: "We are currently experiencing an issue with high error rates on ChatGPT, the API, and Sora. We are currently investigating and will post an update as soon as we are able."