OpenAI's flagship AI productivity platform ChatGPT is currently down for some users, with the company "investigating the issue."
ChatGPT is prone to some minor outages in the way it generates images or text, but this is the first widespread outage in a while.
The first reports appeared on outage tracking website DownDetector at about 02:30 ET this morning with issues on the web, mobile app and desktop app.
OpenAI says it has identified the issue that caused the outage and is working on a fix to restore services. As of 05:00 ET it was still "working on a fix for this issue." Some users have reported regaining access, others see a bad gateway error and others still just get a blank chat window.
While you wait for ChatGPT to come back up check out my guide to ChatGPT alternatives — including Claude 3 and MetaAI.
Follows the roll-out of GPT-4o
The issue appears to be across the entire OpenAI platform, with issues reported around the API used in third-party apps as well as in ChatGPT.
The last update on the OpenAI ChatGPT Status page saw the alert turn from amber to red with the title "ChatGPT is unavailable for some users." Although the actual outage seems to be fairly widespread.
ChatGPT has more than 100 million active users around the world. This is the first big outage since OpenAI made many of the previously paywalled features free.
The update also included bringing GPT-4o, the powerful multimodal AI model announced during the Spring Update to free ChatGPT users.
OpenAI also made its custom GPT library and those made by developers available to free subscribers and the ability to run code and analyze data.
Social reaction to the outage
Looks like even #AI needs to take a mental health break. #ChatGPTdown #AIburnout 🤖😴June 4, 2024
Users took to X to share thoughts on the outage including the idea that "even AI needs a mental health break".
Many of the comments were about the number of posts on X showing people turning to the platform to find out whether ChatGPT really is down.
You also had memes around people suddenly having to think for themselves now the AI isn't there to do it for them.
This story is developing...
