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By Chinenye Anuforo
A major outage plagued the popular chatbot ChatGPT on Tuesday, impacting millions of users worldwide for nearly six hours.
Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT boasts over 100 million users who rely on it for various tasks, including coding assistance, brainstorming, and report generation. The outage, which began around 2.30am ET, rendered the service unusable for users attempting to access it via the web or mobile app.
OpenAI acknowledged the issue but offered limited information initially. After anxious users awaited a resolution for over three hours, the company updated their service status page to indicate they were ‘continuing to work on a fix.’ After nearly six hours, OpenAI announced they had identified and mitigated the problem.
While the exact cause remains undisclosed, some users speculated it differed from a similar outage in November 2023, which stemmed from a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
The disruption significantly impacted users who rely on ChatGPT for their work. The outage likely benefited competitor chatbots like Google Bard and Microsoft Copilot as users sought alternative solutions.
ChatGPT service appears restored but not entirely stable at this time. OpenAI has yet to provide a clear explanation regarding the cause of the outage.
