ChatGPT down worldwide, OpenAI confirms outage

ChatGPT, a popular generative AI bot from startup OpenAI, is reportedly down for many users around the globe. OpenAI said that it's aware of the issue. The company resolved the issue an hour later.

“ChatGPT is seeing elevated error rates. The root cause has been identified, and the team is working on a fix,” OpenAI’s status page said.

According to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, the number of outages skyrocketed less than an hour ago, with thousands reporting the issue.

At the time of writing this article, OpenAI’s status page identified the issue as an “unresolved incident,” narrowing the outage down to the user-facing website for accessing the chatbot.

OpenAI applied the a fix to the problem nearly 40 minutes after the company acknowledged the problem. The problem was apparently caused by an increased CPU usage

“Elevated database CPU usage was impacting the site over the last several hours, and the underlying issue has been addressed. We will continue to monitor the site to ensure the issue does not reoccur,” OpenAI said.

OpenAI, founded by Tesla's CEO Elon Musk and investor Sam Altman, made the ChatGPT chatbot available for free public testing on November 30, 2022. A chatbot is a software application designed to mimic human-like conversation based on user prompts.

The launch of the chatbot was met with exponential user growth as well as competitors such as Google and Baidu scrambling to release their own chatbots. Some researchers fear that humans behind machine learning are not paying enough attention to how their inventions will be used in the future.