OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT, encountered a significant outage early Thursday, leaving millions of users unable to access its services.
Those attempting to use the platform were met with an error message: *“ChatGPT is currently unavailable. Status: Identified—We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix.”
The disruption, which lasted over three hours, sparked frustration among students and professionals who rely on ChatGPT for tasks ranging from academic assignments to workplace projects.
The issue quickly trended on X (formerly Twitter), with over 27,000 posts discussing the downtime. Outage tracker Downdetector confirmed that OpenAI received a similar number of reports globally.
Users voiced their concerns online, with one user, @chrsluvlanguage, tweeting, “Why is ChatGPT down when I need to do my English homework?” Another user, @jasmineeub, lamented, “ChatGPT down and I have a final tomorrow.”
Acknowledging the issue on X, OpenAI stated, “We’re experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix. Sorry, and we’ll keep you updated!”
The outage prompted some users to explore alternatives, such as Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot, which responded cheekily to OpenAI’s post with, “Hi everyone, nice to meet you.”
Services were restored a few hours later, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirming the fix in a post, saying, “We’re back.”
The incident followed a similar disruption earlier in the week affecting Meta’s core platforms.
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