ChatGPT outage left users furious: "Sam Altman is not a good person"

OpenAI is experiencing an outage in the United States and the United Kingdom. The artificial intelligence company said it’s investigating an “elevated error rate” for ChatGPT and its API.

ChatGPT appears to be down in parts of the United States and the United Kingdom. The company behind the AI bot, OpenAI, said that it is “currently experiencing elevated error rates in the API.”

While OpenAI’s status page shows no downtime for ChatGPT and API, it does show that the services have “degraded performance.”

Users across the US and UK have reported issues, mainly with ChatGPT, via Downdetector, a website that allows users to track and report outages in real time.

At its peak, over 6,500 people reported issues with OpenAI’s services in the UK at 1:47 pm on January 23rd, 2025.

In the US, over 4,200 users reported problems with OpenAI, and 91% of people reported issues with ChatGPT.

Users flocked to Downdetector’s comment section to complain about the outage.

One user said, “Time to switch to Claude chat. Sam Altman is not a good person.” Another user commented that they are experiencing a “Bad Gateway” message. “We’re cooked,” says another user.

When attempting to access ChatGPT via the web, it allows you to verify that you’re human, but it remains stuck on the loading screen.

Update: OpenAI's status page reveals that the problems with ChatGPT have been resolved. When testing Cybernews were able to access ChatGPT. The AI company said that between "3:33 AM and 4:23 AM PST, customers experienced elevated error rates on ChatGPT and the API."

In December last year, OpenAI experienced a major worldwide outage across most of its services, including ChatGPT and its text-to-video generation tool, Sora.

The artificial intelligence services experienced major outages and were down worldwide. According to OpenAI, on December 11th, 2024, OpenAI’s API, ChatGPT, and Sora were down for just over four hours.

Other services, including Playground and Labs, were also experiencing issues and were reportedly down for just under three hours.