ChatGPT faces outage amid Ghibli art frenzy; OpenAI says services restored
ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, experienced server outages on Sunday due to an overwhelming demand for its new Studio Ghibli-style image generation feature. The developer quickly responded, announcing that all affected services have been fully restored.
Server Overload and User Frustration
Reports of ChatGPT being down started surfacing on Saturday evening, with users facing difficulties accessing the service. The situation escalated on Sunday around 4 pm, leading to a surge in frustrated users taking to social media to express their disappointment.
Users attempting to access the platform were greeted with error messages indicating that the service was unavailable due to high demand. 
OpenAI acknowledged the server crash and assured users that services were being restored.
Root Cause and Recovery
The outage was primarily attributed to the release of a new feature that allowed users to generate images in the style of Studio Ghibli, a renowned Japanese animation studio. 
This feature quickly gained popularity, resulting in a significant increase in user activity that overloaded the servers.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to social media to address the situation, urging users to limit their image generation activities to allow the team to address the issue promptly. The outage impacted users globally, hindering their ability to use ChatGPT for various tasks, including content creation and coding assistance.
Downdetector, a platform that tracks online service disruptions, recorded a substantial spike in reported issues with OpenAI, further highlighting the widespread impact of the outage.
Restoration and Future Plans
OpenAI informed users that all affected services had been fully recovered and pledged to provide a detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) within the next five business days. The developer assured users that steps were being taken to prevent similar incidents in the future.
The outage serves as a reminder of the growing reliance on AI-powered services and the importance of maintaining robust infrastructure to meet user demands.
Published - March 31, 2025 09:52 am IST
Tags: technology (general), internet, Artificial Intelligence, emerging technologies, science and technology
