OpenAI’s ubiquitous AI chatbot ChatGPT saw a widespread service disruption that affected thousands of users around the world on Tuesday, July 15. The mass outage left people without access to their chats, unable to load previous conversations, or access other OpenAI offerings such as Sora and Codex.
Reports swamped outage monitor DownDetector, with more than 3,400 users reporting at first. Users commonly got “unusual error” messages and were locked out of their chat history. DownDetector said most of the complaints (82%) were directly about ChatGPT being down, with less reported for the site (12%) and app (6%).
OpenAI Confirms Outage, Looking Into Cause
OpenAI quickly admitted the issue on its official service status page. The firm affirmed that “users are seeing high rates of errors” impacting ChatGPT and other related services. Although a root cause wasn’t explicitly given, OpenAI said that its team was “actively investigating the issue” and was in the process of deploying a mitigation to bring back full functionality.
This is the second major outage in July for OpenAI’s services that has left users and developers concerned who use these tools for everyday work. The outage seems to be a global one, as reports are emerging from users based in the United States, India, Europe, and other regions of Asia.
What Users Can Do During The Outage
While OpenAI addressed the technical issues, individuals who rely on AI tools to perform their work can turn to a number of alternatives:
- Claude (Anthropic): Famous for its conversational tone and capability to respond to longer and more complex answers.
- Gemini (Google): Connected with Google apps, this AI can perform complex reasoning, summarising, and coding.
- Microsoft Copilot: Present in Microsoft software such as Word, Excel, and the Edge browser, taking advantage of GPT-4 powers.
- Perplexity AI: Web-search-based AI assistant that gives fast, cited responses by aggregating information from the web.
- YouChat (You.com): Chatbot integrating conversational AI and current web search results.
Users are encouraged to check OpenAI’s official status page or DownDetector for live updates on service return. It is usually best to refrain from repeatedly trying to log in, as this may occasionally result in temporary account locking.
