ChatGPT down: OpenAI says chatbot is experiencing a ‘major outage’

Affected users see messages warning them they have been ‘blocked’

Andrew Griffin
Tuesday 29 August 2023 15:57 BST
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ChatGPT has gone offline, its creators have said.

The artificially intelligent chatbot is experiencing a “major outage”, according to OpenAI, the company behind the system.

It said that ChatGPT was down on both web and mobile, but that it had identified the issue and was working to fix it.

Some users reported seeing a message indicating they had been “blocked” from accessing the tool. The message from web services company Cloudflare told people they were unable to access OpenAI’s site for using ChatGPT.

That led many to fear that they had been specifically and personally blocked from using the service. But the issue in fact appeared to be a technical one, and the “block” message will presumably stop showing once OpenAIfixed the issue.

For others, the system simply would not load properly, and refused to answer questions. “Something went wrong,” a message read, pointing users to its help site.

ChatGPT has stayed largely stable since it was launched. The company says it has been up for 99.88 per cent of the last 90 days, with a few major outages that were quickly fixed.

That is despite immense popularity. When it was launched at the end of November, it quickly became the fastest-growing website in the history of the internet, and it has continued to see significant daily usage.

The outage came just a day after OpenAI launched an enterprise version of ChatGPT, aimed at addressing companies’ concerns about using its technology in their businesses. The new ChatGPT Enterprise includes better security and privacy, unlimited access and more powerful AI tools – though it comes at a price, which OpenAI says will depend on the company’s usage.

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