ChatGPT was down — Here's what happened during the quick OpenAI outage

That's a big spike

Welcome to the OpenAI outage live blog! So far, 1269 concurrent reports have been made over the past hour.

We're getting an understanding of what's happening, and reaching out to OpenAI for comment.

U.S. may not be affected

Now, this could just be because everyone in the U.S. is probably asleep. But this outage report is completely focused on the UK and Europe.

Looking at Status Gator gets us a little more information on this, as the heat map is particularly prominent in Europe right now.

What components are down?

This is an interesting question to answer, as I'm hearing one thing from OpenAI, and another from the people using the service.

According to OpenAI, the issue affects the APIs — the tools developers use to implement ChatGPT into their apps. This is causing slow down or stopping access to it at the moment.

Meanwhile, if you take a look at what the users are reporting, they're saying ChatGPT access is unavailable right now more broadly.

We'll keep investigating.

Here come the X posts

Looking like people are starting to share their frustrations!

Who is affected right now?

Looking at the UK heatmap on downdetector, there seems to be a huge concentration in London and Manchester, as well as reports cropping up from Glasgow, Cambridge and Birmingham.

Well, that was fast...

No need to call it yet, but that spike has massively fallen off — indicating that a fix has been implemented. We'll keep monitoring!

BREAKING: ChatGPT is operational again

OK I'm calling it. After receiving reports from other folks and testing ChatGPT myself, it looks as if service has been restored.

We'll keep a look out in case there's a dreaded second spike, but for now, I'm calling it. Downdetector reports are down to 102, which is considered normal.