Topline
ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI, is experiencing an outage Thursday afternoon.
Reports of the outage began surging around 1:30 p.m. EST. (Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty … [+]
Key Facts
More than 50,000 outages have been reported for ChatGPT on Downdetector.com after a surge in reports around 1:30 p.m EST.
The outage appeared to persist beyond 3:30 p.m. EST., with 3,463 new reports of outages.
A Forbes query given to ChatGPT at 3:40 p.m. EST produced no answer from the Chatbot, with a message reading “Internal Server Error” appearing instead.
OpenAI said in an update posted at 4:05 p.m. EST it was “continuing to work on a fix for this issue,” which was caused by an unnamed internet service provider.
Users on X, home to ChatGPT’s rival chatbot, Grok, complained about the outage, joking that they were back to using their own brains again.
Thursday’s outage is ChatGPT’s second of the month, according to TechCrunch, which noted a roughly six-hour outage occurred two weeks ago.
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What To Watch For
Previous outages have been solved by OpenAI within a few hours after they began. If the company follows its record of previous fixes, ChatGPT may be fixed before night.
Big Number
$157 billion. That is how much OpenAI is valued at following its $6.6 billion funding round in October.
Key Background
In addition to multiple outages this month, ChatGPT also experienced technical difficulties in early June, when it went down for a few hours. ChatGPT is generally regarded as the most popular chatbot in the artificial intelligence market, with CEO Sam Altman saying early this month the AI assistant had more than 300 million weekly users who send over one billion messages a day to ChatGPT. The chatbot can be used for free but has some limitations for users looking to stay away from paid-tiers.
Further Reading
ChatGPT and Sora are down for the second time this month (TechCrunch)
OpenAI Valued At $157 Billion After Closing $6.6 Billion Funding Round (Forbes)
