ChatGPT briefly down for thousands of users, OpenAI says services restored

OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT suffered a brief outage early Wednesday that affected thousands of users, mainly in the United States.

OpenAI acknowledged the disruption on its status page, saying users were experiencing elevated error rates on ChatGPT and potentially related services.

“We’re currently experiencing issues. Some users may experience issues loading or starting conversations,” OpenAI said in an update.

The reports of problems began surfacing around 1:30 am IST on February 4 and peaked at about 1:58 am, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.

The company later said its systems were fully operational, adding, “We’re not aware of any issues affecting our systems.”

OpenAI did not immediately provide details on the cause of the disruption.

ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, has become one of the world’s most widely used artificial intelligence tools, with millions of users relying on it daily for tasks ranging from writing and coding to research and customer support.