Athira Sethu
Kochi, 9 November 2024
Thousands of users were unable to access ChatGPT, a popular chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI, on Friday. The outage which lasted around 30 minutes affected over 19,403 users according to Downdetector.com, a site that tracks service interruptions online.
OpenAI quickly restored ChatGPT, announcing on its website, “Issues with ChatGPT have now been resolved.” Most users were back online by 4:34 p.m. PT, though a few experienced minor issues until 5 p.m.
OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, also acknowledged the disruption in a post on X, “We are much, much better at reliability than we used to be, but more work in front of us,” accompanied by a frowning face emoji.
Therefore, since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has become the most accessed tool and is used by almost 250 million users every week. This has remarkably elevated the value of OpenAI to $157 billion from $14 billion in the year 2021. Revenue has also mushroomed to $3.6 billion and is now more than surpassing early expectations.
While it is the latest drag in this new journey, OpenAI does not give up on the goal of making ChatGPT more stable and accessible to its millions of users.
