Table of Contents
Highlights
- ChatGPT Outage Resolved: OpenAI restored services after a temporary backend routing issue, confirming no security breach.
- Multi-Region Impact: Users across the US, Europe, and parts of South Asia reported elevated error rates and access issues.
- Platform Stability Restored: Core services, including ChatGPT, login, image generation, and Codex, are gradually returning to normal.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT experienced a widespread but temporary service interruption that disrupted access to its servers across multiple regions. What initially appeared to be a minor server-side issue quickly escalated into a significant platform-wide outage, temporarily restricting image uploads, prompt submissions, and access to previous conversations.
The platform users started encountering service disruptions around 3:00 p.m. EST (approximately 1:30 a.m. IST). Reports of the outage spiked soon after, with more than 10,000 incidents reported by 3:15 p.m. EST (1:45 a.m. IST), and the number continues to rise.
Reports Surge as Users Flag Outage Across Platforms:
The disruption triggered a sharp surge in reports on outage-tracking platforms such as DownDetector. As the incident unfolded, users quickly turned to X, driving the hashtag #ChatGPTDown into the trending topics with a high volume of posts, underscoring the scale and visibility of the outage.
OpenAI Rules Out Security Breach:
According to OpenAI, the service anomaly was not caused by a security breach or incident. Instead, it stemmed from a routing or backend configuration issue that triggered a large-scale, multi-regional outage.
Status Page Confirms Elevated Error Rates:
OpenAI acknowledged the issue on its status page, initially citing “elevated error rates for ChatGPT and Platform,” a developer-focused portal for accessing OpenAI’s models. The company later issued a follow-up update referencing “elevated error rates for fine-tuning jobs,” without providing additional technical details.
It also stated that engineering teams were actively working to resolve the problem.
The company responded promptly, reporting that its frontline engineering teams quickly identified the root cause and implemented mitigation measures to stabilize the platform. While service restoration is underway for most affected users, OpenAI cautioned that some users may continue to experience degraded performance or intermittent issues as traffic normalizes.
OpenAI’s status page also confirmed that multiple interconnected services were affected, including ChatGPT conversations, login, file uploads, search, voice mode, image generation, Deep Research, Agent features, Connectors/Apps, and Codex.
Users React With Humor Amid the Outage:
On a lighter note, a user on X shared a humorous post, tweeting “time to use your brain again,” alongside a screenshot from the app displaying the message, “Something went wrong.”
Impact Appears Uneven Across Regions:
Available data indicate that the highest concentration of complaints originated in the United States, Europe, and parts of South Asia, suggesting the disruption was likely isolated to specific infrastructure segments rather than a near-total global shutdown.
In India, reports suggested that the outage was uneven; some users accessed the platform without issue, while others in the same region encountered recurring error messages.
What is the suspected cause of the ChatGPT outage?
Speculation emerged that the disruption may have followed shortly after OpenAI deployed its Codex app for macOS on February 2. CEO Sam Altman previously revealed that the app achieved strong early traction, surpassing 200,000 downloads on its first day.
However, tech publication 9to5Mac noted that there is no clear evidence directly linking the Codex launch to the outage. While an unexpected spike in Codex-related activity may have increased system load, OpenAI has not confirmed this theory, and it remains speculative.
The Significance of the ChatGPT Outage for Users and the Platform:
OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT to the AI world three years ago, on November 30, 2022. Currently, it has more than 800 million active users on a weekly basis. The AI chatbot has been a key driver of OpenAI’s rapid upward trajectory, helping the company surpass $13 billion in revenue last year.
Recently, ChatGPT was valued at $500 billion. While Altman does not have any financial interest in the company, his other key investments make him worth an estimated $3 billion.
In recent times, the company has gone through a lot of outages, which sometimes make users look for other AI platforms, as there is no lack of AI platforms nowadays. Nonetheless, these small kinds of outages may not affect the platform directly, but they still have some impact.
