ChatGPT services have been restored after a widespread outage affected users across multiple countries on Saturday, with OpenAI confirming that affected systems were back online following hours of disruption.
Users across the US, Europe, India, Japan, Australia and other regions reported difficulties accessing the AI chatbot, loading conversations and submitting prompts during the outage.
OpenAI acknowledged the issue through its system status page, saying it was investigating problems affecting ChatGPT and related services. The company later confirmed that the disruption had been resolved and services had returned to normal.
Thousands report ChatGPT access issues
The outage began around 5 am ET on Saturday (10 am GMT), according to The Independent. During the disruption, users reported login failures, connection problems and issues retrieving previous conversations.
Downdetector, a platform that tracks service disruptions based on user reports, recorded a sharp increase in complaints during the outage. More than 3,000 users flagged problems with OpenAI services, with most reports linked to ChatGPT.
Also Read: When AI companies sell models and fear, read between the lines
According to Downdetector data, around 79% of outage reports related to OpenAI were connected to ChatGPT, while others involved the mobile app and Codex, OpenAI’s coding platform.
The disruption also affected OpenAI APIs and Codex, impacting developers and users relying on those services.
OpenAI confirms recovery
As reports of the outage increased, OpenAI updated its status page, noting that ChatGPT was “experiencing issues” with “elevated error rates.”
The company later said it had applied a fix and was monitoring recovery. “We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” OpenAI said in a status update.
Also Read: OpenAI AI models escape Sandbox, hack Hugging Face during security test, raising AI safety concerns
Later, the company marked its systems as operational, stating: “We’re not aware of any issues affecting our systems.”
By Saturday evening, users were able to access ChatGPT normally, with services restored across affected regions.