OpenAI's famous chatbot ChatGPT was inaccessible to users on Monday evening, according to data by website monitoring site DownDetector.
Data from DownDetector showed that disruption peaked around 8 p.m. with thousands of users across the globe reporting problems.
Close to 1,900 people faced issues in the United States, around 900 faced issue in India, and over 200 users had trouble accessing the chatbot in Canada. Almost 90% of the American users struggled with chatGPT's availibity on the web browser, while in India the proportion was around 80%
In a statement on its status page, the company said, “Users unable to load ChatGPT and Codex. We are investigating the issue for the listed services.” It added that users of ChatGPT Business may encounter issues after upgrading or adding new seats for up to an hour. “We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” the company noted.
The advanced AI chatbot's unavailibity mounted some stress on citizens of the internet, owing to high dependency levels. On a lighter note, it also triggered a meme fest on social media.
"chatgpt is down. who else is panicking asking for a friend," asked one X user.
"ChatGPT is down with all services. A major blow for the OpenAI", commented another. While many of the users just filled social media with questions regarding whether or not it was down.
The panic continued and users kept commenting regarding the development. "Im about to crash out ChatGPT is down," said one user.
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Others poked fun around their dependency on ChatGPT, posing questions like, "why is chatgpt down i can't think of my own."
OpenAI's chatbot had experienced a brief outage earlier in February as well. OpenAI had confirmed on its status page that users were experiencing elevated error rates on ChatGPT (and potentially related services), describing issues like difficulties loading or starting conversations.
According to website outage tracker Downdetector, reports began spiking around 3:20-3:30 p.m. ET (1:50-2 a.m. IST on Feb. 4). The number of outage reports peaked at over 12,500. Reports then declined to about 3,700 just before 4 p.m. ET (2:30 a.m. IST), falling below 1,000 shortly after, and reaching fewer than 100.
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