ChatGPT suffers major outage — OpenAI latest

OpenAI announces it's back

OpenAI updated its status page this afternoon with the message “all systems are up and running,” indicating that ChatGPT should be working again. During the second outage of the day, ChatGPT was down for 5 hours and 29 minutes, though it felt much longer.

“ChatGPT experienced a major outage affecting all users on all plans. All ChatGPT related services were affected. platform.openai.com and APIs were not affected. The incident began on June 4th at 2:15pm GMT and was resolved on June 4th at 5:01pm GMT,” the company's status page said.

If ChatGPT still doesn't work, OpenAI says you may need to do a “hard refresh” if you're using the web. “This isn't necessary if you're using ChatGPT on our Mac app or mobile (iOS/Android) app,” the company said.

To perform a hard reset, you need to know the following:

Mac:
For Chrome or Firefox: Press Cmd + Shift + R
In Safari: Press Cmd + Option + R

computer:
Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge: Press Ctrl + F5

Mobile devices:

I manually clear the cache and reload the page as expected.

Now that OpenAI has declared ChatGPT back, I put it to the test, and it's working flawlessly, at least for now. I asked the AI ​​to draw a cool picture of a duck, and after what felt like an average processing time, I was greeted with a lovely illustration of a duck standing next to a pond.

No news is not always good news

The team at OpenAI is supposedly hard at work trying to figure out why ChatGPT is down, but the rest of us are still in the dark. On their website, the status still says “under investigation.” The last update was posted at 10:33am EST, so it's probably about time OpenAI shared some information with us.

Down Detector appears to have seen a dramatic drop in the number of reports, with only 745 reports as of 12:51 PM ET.

OpenAI hasn't posted anything on X since May 30, so outside of the status website the company remains silent.

Perplexity and Claude have also had issues, so if you need to do something with generative AI right now, Google Gemini seems to be your best option, although even Google's tool has reported issues, likely due to increased demand.

The bewildered AI has problems too

The issues just keep popping up. First it was ChatGPT, then Claude started seeing issues reported by users across the web. Now Perplexity is starting to have issues. At around 11:40am EST, users started reporting issues with the Perplexity website and application.

Based on posts seen across X, it appears that Perplexity is displaying an error to users saying, “We are currently receiving many questions.” The error also says, “Your space has been reached. Please check back later.” This means that Perplexity's issues could be due to users without access to ChatGPT jumping on board the platform.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT is still down with no end in sight. Users are still reporting issues on the OpenAI website and Down Detector, so you'll need to keep monitoring the status of this beloved AI tool.

Claude seems to be having problems too.

One of the best ChatGPT alternatives, Claude 3 by Anthropic, also seems to be experiencing issues today, with the website experiencing errors and being mostly offline.

The initial issues with Claude 3 started occurring about an hour ago, and seem to be occurring sporadically rather than being consistently offline like ChatGPT was.

Ups and downs all day

According to Down Detector, the first reports of the new issues came in around 10am ET and rapidly increased over the next hour, with most related to ChatGPT, but there are also issues with websites and apps.

The new outage came about three hours after OpenAI's services appeared to have returned to normal.

Both failures led to jokes in X about the fact that people would suddenly have to use their own brains and think for themselves, rather than just leaving it to the AI.

If you don’t want to figure it out yourself, we have a guide on the best ChatGPT alternatives.

ChatGPT is down again

ChatGPT appears to be down again. New reports of the outage have started appearing on X and DownDetector, and have been confirmed by OpenAI.

The company reported this as a new issue, not a continuation of a previous one, and said it was “currently investigating the issue.”

I first noticed this issue when I was trying to use ChatGPT Voice's new background conversation feature on mobile, which lets you talk to the AI ​​even when you're not using ChatGPT — that is, when ChatGPT is running.

What went wrong?

The cause of today's lengthy outage is unclear, and OpenAI has remained tight-lipped, not posting on social media or responding to media requests for comment.

It's not uncommon for large consumer products to experience extended outages, and Meta has been in that situation multiple times in recent years, for reasons ranging from malicious attacks to human error.

OpenAI is preparing to deploy ChatGPT on millions of new devices ahead of a rumored deal with Apple, and is also close to releasing its compute-intensive GPT-4o Voice feature, which performs voice-to-voice for natural conversations.

This, plus increased demand due to most features now being free, may have led to server overload – we won't know for sure until OpenAI reveals the cause.

Apple is turning its attention to OpenAI

OpenAI is expected to announce a deal with Apple at WWDC next week, which will likely lead to tighter integration between OpenAI products and the Apple ecosystem.

This brings with it increased demand for the servers that also run ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot family of AI products, which are actually run through Microsoft's Azure cloud platform.

Mar Spoonauer, international editor at Tom's Guide, predicts this will have a big impact on the performance of the iPhone, especially Siri.

“In short, assuming this deal is legitimate and announced at WWDC next week, iOS 18 and Siri will become much smarter with the help of OpenAI,” he wrote.

“All systems normal”

OpenAI reports that all systems are now back to normal. The company has not yet issued a statement, but its system status page reports that there are no issues.

The website said the outage lasted a total of two hours and 45 minutes, but the problem actually lasted for nearly four hours.

I've reached out to OpenAI for comment on why this is happening, but have not yet heard back.

ChatGPT is back for some users

Some users, including myself, are starting to regain access to ChatGPT. I've tried it on the web, desktop, and iPhone and it seems to be back to normal.

However, many users are still reporting issues, and the OpenAI status page still shows that it's unavailable for some users.

When we asked ChatGPT (which now has live internet access) for more details about what happened, we were told that the facts about the DDoS attack had been fabricated, and none of the source links used to suggest the cause mentioned DDoS at all.

OpenAI did not disclose the reason for the outage.

Best ChatGPT Alternatives

ChatGPT is one of the very best platforms that gives you access to custom chatbots, image generation, code creation, and GPT-4o models.

However, while there are dozens of AI chatbots on the market, some of which are merely wrappers around GPT-4 or GPT-4o, platforms like Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude stand on their own as direct competitors with their own skills and quirks.

We've put together a guide on the best ChatGPT alternatives and their best uses: if you're searching, we recommend Perplexity, if you prefer friendly chat, try Pi, if you're a big X fan, try Grok.

Possible causes of power outages

OpenAI hasn't said what caused the outage, but some users have suggested they may have spotted a hint for a new model in a drop-down menu when the issues first began occurring.

Some of the issues may be due to increased server load caused by rolling out more advanced features to all ChatGPT users, including those with free accounts.

It's also possible that the company was expanding its capacity in preparation for handling inquiries from billions of iPhones, with the deal with Apple expected to be announced at WWDC next week.

The fix has been implemented

OpenAI says it has implemented a fix but has not disclosed the cause of the outage, which has now lasted for more than four hours.

The makers of ChatGPT have only provided four updates regarding the outage of their flagship product, with the most recent simply saying, “Monitoring – fixes implemented and monitoring results.”

I tried it on the web and was able to access it, but had to reload it a few times as it was unresponsive.

Users visited X and shared their thoughts about the disorder, including the idea that “AI needs mental breaks too.”

Many of the comments were about the number of X posts indicating that people were accessing the platform to find out if ChatGPT was indeed down.

There was also a meme about how people suddenly had to think for themselves because AI could no longer do it for them.

Platform-wide issues

The issue appears to be widespread across the OpenAI platform, with issues also being reported with third-party apps and the API used by ChatGPT.

The last update to the OpenAI ChatGPT status page saw the alert change from yellow to red with the title “ChatGPT is unavailable to some users,” though the actual outage appears to be quite widespread.

ChatGPT has more than 100 million active users worldwide, and this is OpenAI's first major outage since making many of its previously paid features free.

The update also included making GPT-4o, a powerful multi-modal AI model announced in the Spring update, available free of charge to ChatGPT users.

OpenAI provided its custom GPT library, as well as developer-created libraries, to its free subscribers so they could run the code and analyze the data.