OpenAI’s popular artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, experienced a significant global outage Tuesday, with user reports of problems surging across multiple continents.
According to Down Detector, India alone reported more than 800 cases of outages around 3 p.m. local time. Meanwhile, users in the United States and United Kingdom filed over 1,000 complaints combined regarding difficulties accessing ChatGPT.
The issues began around 12:30 p.m. IST and intensified over the subsequent three hours. Users attempting to interact with the AI chatbot frequently encountered a message stating, “A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again. If this issue persists please contact us through our help center at help.openai.com.”
Data from Down Detector indicated that in India, 88% of users reported problems with ChatGPT’s core functionality, 9% experienced app-related outages, and a minor 3% faced issues with the API. In the U.S., 93% of users encountered functional problems, 7% had app issues, and 1% reported API difficulties.
Social media platforms, particularly X (formerly Twitter), became a hub for users sharing screenshots of the error messages and inquiring if others were also experiencing the downtime.
OpenAI acknowledged the problems, with a message on its status page stating, “Some users are experiencing elevated error rates and latency across listed services. We are investigating.”
