On Thursday, just hours after OpenAI announced its integration with iPhone, iPad, and Mac, ChatGPT faced a major outage, making the service inaccessible across the world. Minutes after the outage, the company acknowledged the issue and patched the bug, bringing back the AI chatbot. This is the second major service outage by OpenAI, followed by the one from early November.
OpenAI in X post wrote: “We’re experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix. Sorry, and we’ll keep you updated!”
ChatGPT was down for almost three hours for users across the world, where users faced issues on the web and also on the app. For now, there is no clarity on what caused this outage. Coincidentally, this happened just hours after Meta’s WhatsApp and Facebook also witnessed an outage.
The outage has prevented millions of users from accessing the chatbot, and people were not happy about it, especially those who pay $20 for a plus membership or $200 for a pro membership.
Digital services, despite the best efforts from brands, face outages for a variety of reasons. These can range from technical glitches like software bugs, hardware failures, or network congestion, to human errors in coding or system maintenance, and it is hard to pinpoint an outage to a specific issue unless the maker confirms the same.
Unexpected surges in user traffic can also overpower servers, leading to slowdowns or complete outages.
Additionally, external factors such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, or even power outages can disrupt service availability. As digital infrastructure becomes increasingly complex and interconnected, the potential for disruptions, unfortunately, remains a constant challenge.
