ChatGPT is down due to a massive outage – the latest updates from OpenAI

No news is not necessarily good news

While the team at OpenAI is supposedly hard at work trying to figure out why ChatGPT is down, the rest of us are still in the dark. The company’s website still shows the status as ‘Research’. The last update was posted at 10:33 a.m. ET, so it’s time for OpenAI to give us something.

On Down Detector, reports appear to have dropped dramatically, with only 745 reports coming in as of 12:51 PM ET.

OpenAI hasn’t posted anything on X since May 30, so outside of the status website, the company is still quiet.

With Perplexity and Claude also having issues, it seems like Google Gemini is the best choice if you need to get anything done with generative AI today, although there have also been scattered reports of issues with Google’s tool. This is probably due to an increase in demand.

Perplexity AI also has problems

The problems keep coming. First it was ChatGPT, and then Claude started seeing users reporting problems online. Now Perplexity is starting to have problems. Around 11:40 a.m., ET users began reporting issues with Perplexity’s website and application.

Based on messages seen all over The error message also states that they have “reached capacity. Please check back soon.” That could mean that Perplexity’s problems stem from more users moving to the platform without access to the ChatGPT.

ChatGPT, in turn, is still unavailable and the end is not yet in sight. OpenAI’s website and Down Detector continue to show user issues, so we’ll have to continue monitoring the status of the beloved AI tool.

Claude also seems to have problems

Claude 3 from Anthropic, one of the best alternatives to ChatGPT, also seems to be having problems today. The website gives an error message and is largely offline.

The first issues with Claude 3 started appearing about an hour ago and seem to be sporadic, not consistently offline like ChatGPT.

Up and down all day

According to Down Detector, the first reports of a new song came in around 10:00 AM ET, with a very rapid spike in the following hour. The vast majority involve ChatGPT, but there are also website and app issues.

The new outage came about three hours after services for OpenAI appeared to be back to normal.

Both glitches led to jokes on

If you don’t want to think for yourself, we have a guide to the best ChatGPT alternatives.

ChatGPT is going off the air again

It looks like ChatGPT is offline again. Reports of a new outage appeared on X and DownDetector and have since been confirmed by OpenAI.

The company is reporting this as a new outage rather than a continuation of the previous one, saying “we are currently investigating this issue.”

I first noticed the problem when I tried to use ChatGPT Voice’s new background calling feature on mobile. This lets you talk to the AI ​​even when you’re not in ChatGPT – that’s when ChatGPT works.

What went wrong?

It is not yet clear what caused the long-lasting disruption today. OpenAI is keeping tight-lipped, not posting on social media and not responding to media requests for comment.

It is not unusual for a major consumer product to experience a prolonged outage; Meta has suffered from this several times in recent years. The cause could be anything from a malicious attack to human error.

OpenAI is in the process of increasing availability ahead of a highly rumored deal with Apple to bring ChatGPT to millions of new devices. It’s also about to roll out the power-hungry GPT-4o Voice feature, which performs speech-to-speech for natural conversations.

This, combined with growing demand due to making most features free, could have contributed to server overload. We won’t know for sure until OpenAI decides to share the case – if they do.

Apple has an eye for OpenAI

OpenAI is expected to announce a deal with Apple at WWDC next week. This would likely result in deep integration between OpenAI’s products and the Apple ecosystem.

This will increase demand for the servers that also power ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot family of AI products. These servers are actually managed by Microsoft through the Azure cloud platform.

Mar Spoonauer, editor-in-chief of Tom’s Guide, predicts this will have a major impact on the iPhone and specifically on Siri’s performance.

“The bottom line is that iOS 18 and Siri will become much smarter with the help of OpenAI, assuming this deal is legit and announced at WWDC next week,” he wrote.

‘All systems normal’

OpenAI reports that all systems are back to normal. Although the company has not yet issued a statement, the system status page reports that everything is safe.

According to the website, the outage lasted a total of two hours and 45 minutes, but in reality there were problems for almost four hours.

I’ve asked OpenAI for comment on the cause, but haven’t received a response yet.

ChatGPT is back for some users

Some users, including myself, have started accessing ChatGPT again. I’ve tried it on the web, desktop and iPhone and it seems to be back to normal.

However, a number of users are still reporting issues and the OpenAI status page still says it is unavailable for some users.

I asked ChatGPT for an overview of what happened (it now has live Internet access) and it came up with a fact about a DDoS attack. None of the links it used to suggest this was the cause mention DDoS at all.

OpenAI has not provided a reason for the outage.

Best ChatGPT Alternatives

ChatGPT is an incredibly impressive platform, with access to custom chatbots, image generation, code creation and the GPT-4o model – it’s one of the best.

However, there are dozens of AI chatbots on the market and while some are just wrappers for GPT-4 or GPT-4o, platforms like Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude stand alone as direct competitors with their own skills and quirks.

I’ve put together a guide to the best ChatGPT alternatives and what they are best used for. If you’re searching I recommend Perplexity, if you want a friendly chat try Pi and if you’re a big fan of X then check out Grok.

Possible causes of the malfunction

OpenAI hasn’t said what caused the glitch, although some users suggested they could find hints of a new model in the drop-down menu when things first started going wrong.

Some issues may be due to increased server load due to the rollout of more advanced features to all ChatGPT users, including those with free accounts.

With the Apple deal likely to be announced at WWDC next week, they may also have expanded capacity before having to answer questions from billions of iPhones.

A solution has been implemented

OpenAI says it has implemented a fix, but has not said what caused the outage, which has now persisted for more than four hours.

There have been only four updates from the ChatGPT maker about the glitch in its flagship product. The latter simply says: “Monitoring – A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.”

I tried on the web and was able to access it, but it’s unresponsive and I had to reload a few times.

Users took to X to share their 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

You also had memes about people suddenly having to think for themselves now that the AI ​​isn’t there to do it for them.

Platform-wide issue

The issue appears to be across the OpenAI platform, with issues reported around the API used in third-party apps and in ChatGPT.

In the last update to the OpenAI ChatGPT status page, the warning changed from orange to red with the title “ChatGPT is not available for some users.” Although the actual outage seems to be quite widespread.

ChatGPT has more than 100 million active users around the world. This is the first major outage since OpenAI made many of its previously paid features free.

The update also included the introduction of GPT-4o, the powerful multi-modal AI model announced during the Spring Update, to free ChatGPT users.

OpenAI has also made its custom GPT library and that of developers available to free subscribers and the ability to run code and analyze data.