ChatGPT down: OpenAI reports major outage across globe
ChatGPT was coming back online after a global outage on Thursday morning saw users of the OpenAI chatbot service getting a message that it was “currently unavailable”. OpenAI said it had “identified the issue” and was working to roll out a fix. The company confirmed that its new text-to-video AI platform, Sora, suffered an outage as well. “Sorry and we’ll keep you updated!” the AI company said.
Impact of the Outage
At the peak of the outage, about 75 per cent of ChatGPT users globally reported problems, according to a web traffic monitoring site, Downdetector. “Traffic recovery is ongoing and we are bringing ChatGPT traffic back up by region,” OpenAI said on its website. “We are monitoring the situation to ensure full resolution.” Sora’s traffic had also “largely recovered”, the firm added.
Related Outages
The OpenAI outage came just hours after Meta platforms Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads went down, affecting users across the world on Wednesday. Meta said it was “99 per cent of the way there” in fixing the social media blackout. “We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and are sorry for any inconvenience,” the company said. The platforms appeared to soon recover, with most of its apps functioning normally within the hour.
“We’re back, happy chatting!” WhatsApp said on its official X account. “Andddd we’re back – sorry for the wait, and thanks for bearing with us,” Instagram said. Meta said it expected “things to be back to normal shortly”. “We apologise to those who’ve been affected by the outage,” the parent company added.
Technical Insights
Meta runs its many apps as separate entities but they share some technical architecture. This means that wide outages at the company could take them all down at the same time. Meta had hinted at bringing its apps together to make them interoperable for users, but lately seemed to have cancelled the plan amid regulatory pressure.
