ChatGPT goes down — latest update on OpenAI's massive outage

ChatGPT may be back online, as spotted by Tom's Guide Global Editor Mark Spoonauer, who says the service is currently investigating an outage.

We recommend doing a “hard refresh” on your browser or Mac app.

Down Detector still reports that ChatGPT is down, but we were able to get it to work for a short while.

Tom's Guide Global Editor-in-Chief Mark Spoonauer found something pretty interesting at X.

As we've posted before on this live blog, people are flocking to ChatGPT alternatives. No wonder #GoogleGemini is trending on X. One company's loss is another company's gain, I guess.

DownDetector users have shared their experiences: despite being able to send requests through ChatGPT, no response is generated – instead of a proper response, they see a flashing black dot.

Users on X (formerly Twitter) are still discussing ChatGPT being down, and while some are legitimately annoyed, some (such as the user in the post above) are trying to make light of the situation.

Still, if you rely on ChatGPT for work, you're probably having a bad Monday. Thankfully, this recent outage hasn't caused any serious problems for anyone.

As of 4:15pm, it's still not working, but it appears to be trying to: When you type in a query (in this case “is it working?”), it displays a blinking black dot for a while, then goes back to the error message.

However, Gemini, Claude 3, and Perplexity all seem to work fine.

How to do a hard reset on ChatGPT

Even if ChatGPT's service is back up and running, you may need to perform a hard reset to get it working properly. Here's what you need to know:

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.

Update (4pm ET): ChatGPT is still down. It looked like it was starting to recover a bit, but progress seems to have stalled. The comments section on DownDetector is also now a bit more heated.

“How can you use chat gpt to create a policy-violating article if your AI is down,” ThunderChannel 100 wrote.

“I asked chatgpt when this will be fixed. Still waiting for a response,” David wrote.

What is ChatGPT? In case you've stumbled upon this article and are wondering what all the fuss is about, ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that can do everything from write papers to create images based on text prompts you type in. Though it was released in 2022, it's gained massive popularity over the past year as one of the leading AIs, as companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple rush to incorporate artificial intelligence into their products.

According to company logs, ChatGPT has experienced at least one major outage every month since March, some of which lasted as short as 30 minutes and others that lasted more than eight hours.

Our Global Editor-in-Chief, Mark Spoonauer, currently loves ChatGPT's super simple interface: no history, no answers to your questions, you can just sit back and think about what AI can do for you.

The last time ChatGPT was down, there was a surge in traffic to the best alternatives to ChatGPT, which resulted in these services suffering increased load. Anthropic's Claude and Perplexity both had issues. We will be monitoring these as well to see if they are affected by this latest ChatGPT outage.

Others have complained in threads about ChatGPT's outage: “I think ChatGPT is trying to do Football Manager too much,” asherwood21 wrote.

Not surprisingly, many have taken to social media to air their frustrations.

This tweet from @Egocrata on X sums up the frustration of many ChatGPT users: “ChatGPT would be so much more useful if this shitty service wasn't down half the time. Totally unreliable.”

The comments on DownDetector paint a pretty bad picture of the recent ChatGPT outage, with one user, ANA, saying, “I've used Perplexity which is much better than this garbage.”

Last week, OpenAI and Apple announced a partnership that will see ChatGPT integrated into Apple's own AI platform, called Apple Intelligence, in iOS 18. In this implementation, the majority of the processing is done on-device before being sent to Apple's servers.

ChatGPT went offline for around four hours on June 4 until engineers managed to resolve the issue, but some users noted they had to perform a “hard refresh” to get the service up and running again.

While we wait for ChatGPT to make a comeback, it's worth checking out our guides to ChatGPT alternatives such as Claude 3 and MetaAI.

According to DownDetector, reports of OpenAI being down appear to have started around 2pm ET.

About 40 minutes later, a status update from OpenAI stated that they were “currently investigating an elevated error rate affecting ChatGPT.”