ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, was facing a widespread outage on Thursday afternoon, causing disruption for thousands of users.
Reports of the issue began flooding in around 1:30 p.m. EST, with more than 50,000 outage reports posted on Downdetector.com. The problem appeared to persist well into the afternoon, with new outage reports continuing to surface as late as 3:30 p.m. EST.
Users attempting to access the service were met with error messages, and a Forbes test query conducted at 3:40 p.m. EST returned an “Internal Server Error” message instead of the usual response. OpenAI acknowledged the issue shortly after, posting an update at 4:05 p.m. EST, stating that they were working to resolve the problem, which was traced back to an issue with an unnamed internet service provider.
The outage sparked frustration and humor across social media platforms, with users on X, home to ChatGPT’s competitor Grok, joking about being forced to use their own brains again. This marked the second outage for ChatGPT in December alone, following a six-hour downtime earlier in the month, according to TechCrunch.
While the disruption affected many, previous outages have typically been resolved within a few hours, and OpenAI was expected to restore the service before the day ended.
ChatGPT, which boasts over 300 million weekly users and processes over a billion messages daily, remains a key player in the rapidly growing artificial intelligence market. Its valuation recently reached $157 billion following a $6.6 billion funding round in October.
