ChatGPT faces widespread outage, users report errors; OpenAI scrambles to fix issues

OpenAI's popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, experienced a major outage on Tuesday, with users across India and globally reporting difficulties in accessing the service, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.

The surge in outage reports began around 1:45 pm IST and peaked at 3:00 pm IST.

In India, 88% of affected users faced problems with the core functioning of ChatGPT, while 9% reported outages on the app.

A smaller 3% encountered issues with the API, Downdetector data showed.

Users entering prompts in ChatGPT were greeted with the message, "Hmm... something seems to have gone wrong."

OpenAI confirmed the outage in a status update, saying it was “currently experiencing issues” and noting “elevated error rates and latency” across its services, including Sora, its text-to-video platform.

“We are continuing to investigate,” the company said, offering no estimate for when the systems might be back to normal.

Users aired frustration on X over their inability to use the AI chatbot.

“Experiencing some issues with ChatGPT. Seems like it’s down,” one user posted, tagging OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman.

Another user wrote, “When ChatGPT is so overworked it can’t even finish your message … Today, many users (myself included) are facing errors in the message stream. Is OpenAI having a burnout day?”