WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - OpenAI's flagship chatbot, ChatGPT, experienced a widespread outage on Tuesday, disrupting access for millions of users worldwide. The company reported elevated error rates and latency issues across its services, including ChatGPT, its API offerings, and the recently launched Sora platform.
The outage began early in the day, with OpenAI first investigating the issue around 7:36 a.m. ET. By 11:30 a.m., the company acknowledged the disruption on its website, stating, 'Some users are experiencing elevated error rates and latency across the listed services. We are continuing to investigate this issue.'
Throughout the afternoon, the company provided updates, eventually identifying the root cause and initiating recovery efforts. However, by 5:30 p.m., performance was still described as 'degraded,' and full functionality had not yet been restored.
Users encountered various error messages, including 'Hmmm. something seems to have gone wrong,' and, 'A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again.' Others reported unusually long response times and intermittent failures within the app.
At the outage's peak, nearly 2,000 incidents were logged on DownDetector. Reports declined to around 500 by mid-afternoon, indicating gradual recovery.
ChatGPT, which launched in November 2022, has become one of the world's most widely used AI tools, with over 400 million weekly active users and 10 million paying subscribers.
OpenAI, now valued at $300 billion, has rapidly expanded its offerings, most recently introducing GPT-4o a multimodal AI model capable of generating text, images, and audio available even to free-tier users.
The disruption highlights the increasing reliance on generative AI tools in education, business, and everyday communication. While OpenAI's engineering team acted swiftly, the incident underscores the challenges of maintaining uptime and reliability for platforms now deeply integrated into users' daily lives.
Meanwhile, the broader conversation around AI adoption continues to evolve. On the same day, U.K. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer announced plans to equip secondary school students with skills for AI-driven careers, reflecting how integral the technology has become to future job markets.
As OpenAI works toward full service restoration, the incident serves as a reminder of both the immense potential and the fragility of rapidly advancing AI infrastructure.
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