OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT experienced a brief global outrage on Friday that affected thousands of users.
According to the website Downdetector.com, ChatGPT’s services were down for about half an hour and affected over 19,403 users as of 7:13 pm ET.
Reportedly, 79% users said they had problems with ChatGPT generally, while,15% complained about the mobile application and 6% were unable to use the website.
Users took to social media to report the problem, with many expressing their worries on social media.
“Chat GPT is down and I need help on the last question of my exam,” a user joked on X.
This was acknowledged by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who also took to X to post that ChatGPT had been down for thirty minutes with a frown emoji. He said, “We are much, much better at reliability than we used to be, but clearly more work in front of us.”
chatgpt went down for 30 mins today 🙁 we are much, much better at reliability than we used to be, but clearly more work in front of us.
(it is now the 8th biggest website in the world according to similarweb–we have had a lot of work to do these past two years!)
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 9, 2024
However, the outrage was very brief and quickly resolved. Users were then able to access it properly once again.
“Issues with ChatGPT have now been resolved,” OpenAI said in a statement on its website.
The company reported that access was restored to most users by 4:34 p.m. PT (0034 GMT on Saturday). However, a small number of users faced issues until later.
This is the second time ChatGPT has experienced a massive outrage in November 2024: it experienced a similar problem last Monday just days after launching its OpenAI launched its search engine into the chatbot. The website showed a “404 Not Found” error message when users opened it, although this was also quickly resolved.
