ChatGPT Suffers Global Outage Once Again (Update)

Update 13:48: OpenAI has updated its status page and claims that all systems are operational, but it appears that ChatGPT is still suffering from a partial crash. Some users report being able to talk to the chatbot again.

Recently, ChatGPT has been struggling with an outage. Although OpenAI’s chatbot website sometimes loads, no response actually follows any input from users.

The outage has only lasted for a short time. However, there has been thousands of reports of a problem since 12.30 p.m. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with the API. Those who manage to reach the website often get “Internal server error” as a response back from the website. Currently, the chat.openai.com site shows “Bad Gateway” or a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable message. Even paying users cannot contact the service via this URL.

High demand

ChatGPT also struggled with a global outage in December. At the time, OpenAI confirmed via X that there were problems with the service. At the time of writing, a similar message has not yet appeared this time. This is not too surprising as the disruption has only just begun. It is possible that it will end soon.

The cause of a DoS outage like this is usually too big a question. OpenAI competitor Anthropic regularly chooses to make some Claude models (such as the Claude 3.5 Sonnet) only available to paying users. OpenAI keeps the best LLMs (such as unlimited GPT-4o and o1) behind a paywall. With ChatGPT Prothe company even introduced a $200 per month, which would be losing even at that price point.

We will update this post when the service is available again. If we haven’t yet detected that the service is backed up, you can always consult OpenAI’s own status page.

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