Athira Sethu
Kochi, 12 December 2024
The ChatGPT chatbot, a product of Microsoft-backed OpenAI, suffered a global outage yesterday, presenting problems to users worldwide. The outage also affected other OpenAI services, such as the API and the Sora video generation platform.
On Thursday morning, OpenAI updated its X account saying, “We’re currently experiencing an outage. We’ve identified the problem and are working on a roll out of a fix. Sorry and we’ll keep you updated!” Later on, the company updated its website stating, “We have identified a pathway to recovery and are starting to see some traffic successfully return. Continuing to work to return service to normal.”
Downdetector, which provides service disruption tracking, received about 2,483 reports of problems by early Thursday. Several users-even paying subscribers-found themselves unable to log in to ChatGPT. Some business users that apply OpenAI’s API to deploy AI projects were also experiencing problems.
This is not the first outage of ChatGPT. On November 8, 2024, this chatbot was down for 30 minutes, cutting off more than 19,000 users worldwide. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the issue when he said, “We are much, much better at reliability than we used to be, but clearly more work in front of us.”
ChatGPT had a more extensive blackout in June, which took place for more than five hours. Since it went public in November 2022, ChatGPT increased to 250 million users weekly. The valuation for OpenAI is currently now at $157 billion while revenue is $3.6 billion. About a week ago, this month, Altman indicated that the company has achieved 300 million active weekly users.
The outage comes not long after major social networking services, such as WhatsApp and Facebook and Instagram, started having outages, leaving several people unable to log in or publish content. Meta, the parent company that runs Facebook and Instagram, confirmed they knew about the issue but are working to resolve the matter.
