ChatGPT down: AI system goes offline in ‘major outage’

Technical issues come just days after creators OpenAI revealed new updates

ChatGPT is offline in a “major outage”.

Anyone attempting to use the artificial intelligence system saw a warning that it was “at capacity right now”. The error page also includes a ChatGPT-written rap about the status of ChatGPT, which begins with the phrase “Yeah, yo, what’s up ChatGPT fam”.

But on its status page, creators OpenAI said it was suffering a “major outage” that was being investigated urgently and had lasted for more than an hour. The latest update on that page indicated that engineers had “identified an issue” with the system and was working to fix it.

The problems also affected OpenAI’s API service, which allows third-party services to connect to its AI systems. Both went down at the same time.

It is the first major outage on the system for months. While it has seen some problems in recent weeks, they have been partial outages that have slowed or otherwise interfered with ChatGPT’s performance, rather than going fully offline.

One of those difficulties came last night, when OpenAI said that both ChatGPT and its API had been suffering from a partial outage.

The problems comes days after OpenAI held its first developer conference, on Monday, though there is no indication the two events are connected. At that conference, it announced a range of new features including a new tool it calls “GPTs”, which let people easily create their own custom versions of ChatGPT.

During that same event, OpenAI announced that one hundred million people use ChatGPT each week. Some two million developers are also working on the platform, its chief executive Sam Altman said.

ChatGPT became the fastest-growing app in history when it launched last November, as well as igniting worldwide excitement and panic over artificial intelligence. It saw 100 million users join in two months, a dramatic record that was later beaten by Meta’s Instagram Threads.