ChatGPT is down again for many – here's everything we know about ...
ChatGPT was down for many users again today, with a significant number experiencing slow performance and error messages – in a more minor repeat of the problems we saw on March 31. The website Downdetector again showed a large spike in reports in the US and UK at around 9am ET / 2pm BST, which was the same time we saw issues on Monday.
Recent Outages
Previously, users reported either laggy performance or error messages like "something went wrong" on the desktop version and "upstream connect error" on the mobile app. Today, the OpenAI status page acknowledged a combination of "login issues" and "increased error rates".
Alongside OpenAI's status page messages, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has also now responded on X (formerly Twitter), stating that "we are getting things under control, but you should expect new releases from openai to be delayed, stuff to break, and for service to sometimes be slow as we deal with capacity challenges".
CEO Statement
We now have our first comment about ChatGPT's patchy performance this week from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. His post on X (formerly Twitter) confirms what most of us have been thinking – that the problems are related to the company's frantic rollout of major features like ChatGPT's new image generator.
Yesterday Altman was crowing that ChatGPT had acquired "one million users in the last hour". To put that in perspective, ChatGPT took five days to attract the same number of users when it launched in 2022 – when it became the fastest-growing consumer app in history.
Capacity Challenges
So yes, we can see why OpenAI might be experiencing capacity issues, while also having lots of sympathy for the paying ChatGPT Plus users who are wondering why on earth the company just rolled out the new image generation feature to free users and is now apparently considering doing the same with Deep Research.
Current Status
OpenAI posted on its Status Monitor that its login issues were resolved at 9.20am ET / 2.20pm BST, so why have lots of users been having problems since? It turns out a second issue, our old friend "increased error rates" from yesterday, has also returned over the past few hours.
That might explain why ChatGPT has been uncooperative for you again today. Fortunately, at 11.12am ET / 4.12PM BST, OpenAI posted that "all impact services have now fully recovered", so we should see those error messages fizzle out, leaving us to melt OpenAI's GPUs again in peace.
Continued Monitoring
At almost exactly the same time as yesterday (9am ET / 2pm BST), there's been another spike in reports of ChatGPT problems on Downdetector – and OpenAI has also confirmed "login issues" on its Status page. The good news is that the 'history' section of OpenAI's status page posted at 9.20am ET / 2.20am BST that "all impacted services have now fully recovered" and that "users globally should be able to login without issue". So hopefully this tremor should be short-lived and a bit less disruptive than yesterday's...
Full Functionality Restored
Aside from an ongoing wrinkle around new signups for ChatGPT and Sora in some regions, the AI chatbot now seems to have recovered from its latest wobble – and is back to full working order. We'll be keeping a close eye on ChatGPT this week, because it's clearly been under strain from some unpredented load following the roll-out of its viral image generation feature. But for now, we're happy to see that it's back to its error message-free self.
