Explained: What Is Behind ChatGPT's Frequent Outages
ChatGPT, OpenAI's commonly used AI chatbot, is currently experiencing a major global outage, marking the fifth disruption reported this year. This ongoing interruption has affected a vast number of users across various countries, with notable impacts in India and the United States. The outage not only affected access to ChatGPT but also to Sora, OpenAI's AI-driven video-generation tool.
What Happened?
The outage, which commenced on June 10 around 3:00 pm, led to users encountering difficulties in accessing ChatGPT. In India, Downdetector recorded over 800 complaints within the initial hour, with 88% related to unresponsive chats, 8% linked to the mobile app, and 3% attributed to API malfunctions. In the US, 93% of users reported errors with the chatbot. Users faced messages such as "Hmm...something seems to have gone wrong" and "A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again."
OpenAI confirmed the issue, mentioning elevated error rates and latency for both ChatGPT and Sora. While the company assured users of active investigations into the cause, no specific timeline for full service restoration was provided. Users were encouraged to monitor the status page for updates.
Reasons Behind The Outage
Reports from The Verge, The NY Post, and insights from OpenAI's engineers suggest multiple underlying reasons for the outage.
Firstly, the surge in demand plays a significant role. ChatGPT, especially post the GPT-4o launch, has become deeply integrated into the daily lives of various user groups like students, professionals, developers, and businesses. Its utility in content generation, coding assistance, scheduling, and customer service has led to millions relying on it. Unforeseen spikes in user traffic can overwhelm the system.
Secondly, the centralized architecture of ChatGPT poses challenges. A failure in a single server cluster or software component can trigger cascading issues across the network. Outages have been linked to load balancing issues, backend software updates, and cloud resource constraints. OpenAI's rapid expansion of tools has also strained the existing backend infrastructure, exacerbated by the introduction of Sora and other AI functionalities.
OpenAI ChatGPT Outages In 2025
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