OpenAI's ChatGPT is back up after a serious outage

OpenAI's ChatGPT experienced its largest global outage of 2024 on Tuesday, when users were unable to make use of the chat platform for as much as 5 hours.

If you had trouble using ChatGPT yesterday, you weren't alone. The first signs of trouble appeared around 2:30 AM ET, when web, desktop, and mobile app users were unable to access the service.

OpenAI said it was “working on a fix for this issue.” The issue seemed to be resolved at 7:45 a.m. ET, only to go down again at 10:30 a.m. ET.

OpenAI didn’t provide any information concerning the explanation for the difficulty, but said it was limited to ChatGPT and API access was not affected.

Claude, Perplexity and Gemini users also had problems for about an hour.

The problems with these AI platforms coincided with the publication of an open letter from current and former OpenAI employees warning of the “serious risks” and lack of control of AI.

This has led some to invest whether the outages were an easy glitch or something more intentional, resembling a DDOS attack in protest against AI security issues.

🚨 The following AI systems have failed

OpenAI – ChatGPT
Google- Twins down
AnthropicAI – Claude down
Perplexity downwards

DDOS or simply a coincidence??ChatGPT?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>#ChatGPT pic.twitter.com/wzhA8Sf9Zr

— AshutoshShrivastava (@ai_for_success) June 4, 2024

It might have been an easy technical error and even a mix of a DDOS attack on ChatGPT followed by user traffic being redirected to other platforms.

When ChatGPT went down, there was a 60 percent increase in searches for ChatGPT alternatives. The flood of disillusioned ChatGPT users suddenly using Gemini, Claude and Perplexity would have put unexpected strain on these servers.

It looks as if all of those services are back up, but outages like this show how vulnerable our society becomes once we rely so heavily on these tools.

If the hours-long outage had impacted API access because it did last November, it will have been extremely disruptive for firms which have integrated GPT-4 into their operations.