ChatGPT Access Restored by OpenAI After Users Report Issues With Accessing the AI Chatbot [Updated]

ChatGPT Down: Thousands of users have reported facing issues while accessing the OpenAI chatbot on Wednesday. As per an Internet outage monitoring platform, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot began having issues at 12:25pm IST. While the number of reports has gone down, the San Francisco-based AI firm has not confirmed that the issue has been resolved so far. The company has, however, updated its status page and confirmed that it is working on fixing the problem as soon as possible.

Update: OpenAI published an update on its Status page at 3:53pm IST on Wednesday, stating that the issue is now resolved and all services are now fully operational.

ChatGPT Suffers Global Outage

According to the Internet outage monitor Downdetector, the AI chatbot's outage began at 12:25pm IST, and peaked at 12:56pm IST. At its peak, as many as 547 users reported facing issues accessing ChatGPT. So far, the reports have not gone down, highlighting that it is an ongoing issue. Interestingly, the platform also highlights a larger outage on Tuesday at 2:40am IST, when around 2,200 users complained about the platform.

OpenAI has also updated its status page and acknowledged the issue. Calling it a partial outage company said, “We're currently experiencing issues. ChatGPT not displaying responses. We are investigating the issue for the listed services.” Notably, the AI firm has not mentioned the reason behind either of the outages.

Breaking down the outage, as per the outage monitor, about 82 percent of the users reporting the outage have faced issues accessing ChatGPT across all platforms, whereas 15 percent of them have only reported facing issues while accessing the website. About 2 percent have found issues while using the app. The issue has not affected everyone, but those affected are reportedly not seeing any responses after sending a message.

Notably, the platform's outage occurred just a day after OpenAI shared its plans to update the chatbot to make it safer for teenagers and users facing emotional distress. The company previewed several safeguards it is working on, including new parental controls and human monitoring of conversations around harming others, to ensure that the chatbot better handles sensitive situations.

These safeguard plans were shared after after ChatGPT was involved in two tragic incidents where people lost their lives. In the first incident, a teenager committed suicide after confiding in ChatGPT for months, and in the second, a 56-year-old man committed suicide after killing his mother.