ChatGPT hit by major outage, leaving thousands in the lurch

Thousands of users have reported experiencing difficulties accessing ChatGPT, the popular artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI.

Reports of the outage began surfacing around 2:00 PM (11:00 GMT) on Thursday, with users encountering error messages preventing them from using the service.

Downdetector, a website that monitors online service disruptions, recorded over 10,000 reports of ChatGPT being down in the UK alone. Users attempting to connect were met with a “bad gateway error” message, indicating a problem with the server connection.

OpenAI has acknowledged the issue on its status page, stating that the application has been “experiencing elevated error rates” and that the company is actively investigating the cause.

While OpenAI has yet to release a public statement beyond the status page update, the BBC has reached out for further comment.

The outage has prompted numerous users to express their frustration on social media, highlighting the significant disruption caused by the service interruption.

The widespread nature of the outage suggests a significant issue affecting OpenAI’s servers or infrastructure.

ChatGPT offers both a free version and various paid subscription tiers, with memberships costing up to $200 per month. The service boasts a massive user base, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealing in December that ChatGPT has over 300 million weekly users globally.

This outage comes amidst a period of substantial investment in AI infrastructure, with tech companies, including OpenAI, pledging a substantial $500 billion investment in the US. The incident underscores the challenges of maintaining consistent uptime for such large-scale AI services, even with significant resources.