ChatGPT was down — live updates on sudden OpenAI outage

Sudden Spike

Starting around 9:30 a.m. PT the outage tracking site Down Detector suddenly hit over 10,000 reports in a matter of minutes.

Some commentors on the site reported that their projects weren't loading or it wasn't pulling up chat history.

OpenAI has not acknowledged the issue yet

On OpenAI's official status page, there is no acknowledgement of the outage.

As of this posting, it lists everything as "fully operational" with all functions listed in green.

Conversations failed

A ChatGPT user on Twitter posted screenshots of failed conversations and noted that they have a Pro account with OpenAI.

It echoes other comments that I'm seeing on Twitter and in Down Detector comments.

OpenAI investigating

OpenAI just caught up and updated its official status page acknowleding the outage.

"We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services."

So far, only ChatGPT appears to be affected. Sora and any APIs are still in the green.

Second sudden spike in as many days

A similar spike occurred yesterday, Feb. 3, that one wa short lived though and quickly went away.

So far, it's not clear if today's issue will follow a similar trajectory.

How are you affected?

On X, poster John Chen posted that ChatGPT wouldn't load his profile or let him upload images. He appears to be based out of Toronto. A fellow user said he was having issues in southern California.

Reports declining

We're about half an hour into today's issue.

The spike peaked at just over 15,000 reports on Down Detector. As of this posting, it sits around 4,200.

The OpenAI status page is still listing issues with a slightly new message.

"We are investigating the issue for the listed services," it now reads. The service experiencing issues is ChatGPT.

Mitigation applied

OpenAI says that it has applied a mitigation and are monitoring recovery for ChatGPT.

The outage is mostly over but we're keeping an eye on things incase it goes back down.

Calling it

Thanks for sticking around for today's brief ChatGPT outage. OpenAI hasn't suffered any major multihour outages recently but it has annoyingly been infected with this 35 to 45 minutes ones in recent weeks.

Today's spike is finally under 500 reports.

It's not yet clear where on the company's end the issue is stemming from. Likely it's infrastructural which means that OpenAI needs to bolster ChatGPT, but that is speculation.