Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT, was restored after an outage impacted thousands of users, the company confirmed. OpenAI issued a statement on its website, saying, “Issues with ChatGPT have now been resolved.”
Most users regained access by 4:34 p.m. PT (0034 GMT Saturday), though a small number continued to experience problems until 5 p.m. PT (0100 GMT Saturday). OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to X (formerly Twitter) to acknowledge the disruption, stating that ChatGPT had been down for 30 minutes. He added a frown emoji and remarked, “We are much, much better at reliability than we used to be, but clearly more work in front of us.”
According to outage tracking site Downdetector.com, the ChatGPT outage lasted approximately half an hour, affecting over 19,400 users as of 7:13 p.m. ET (0013 GMT Saturday).
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman apologises
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman apologised on X (formerly Twitter) after the company’s flagship AI chatbot, ChatGPT, experienced a 30-minute outage. He wrote, “chatgpt went down for 30 mins today ???? we are much, much better at reliability than we used to be, but clearly more work in front of us. (it is now the 8th biggest website in the world according to similarweb–we have had a lot of work to do these past two years!)”
“Sorry for the inconvenience and we will get back to work” Altman added.
Since its launch in November 2022, ChatGPT has seen rapid growth, attracting 250 million weekly active users. OpenAI’s valuation has soared to $157 billion, up from $14 billion in 2021, with revenues hitting $3.6 billion, far surpassing Altman’s initial projections.
