OpenAI’s ChatGPT experienced a sudden global outage, leaving hundreds of users unable to access the service via the app or website. According to Downdetector, thousands of users in the US have reported facing difficulties with the AI chatbot, whereas in the UK, the number of affected users is nearly 1,500 at the time of writing. In India, over 300 users have reported the same issues. The disruption sparked a wave of tweets and memes on X (formerly Twitter) with users sharing screenshots of error messages.
As shared by users, the AI chatbot throws “A network error occurred” to users’ prompts. However, it remains unclear whether the issue affects all users or only those in specific regions.
OpenAI has acknowledged the outage on its status page. In a recent post, the company stated, “Some users are experiencing elevated error rates and latency across the listed service. We are continuing to investigate this issue.” Though the reason for ChatGPT’s failure is still unclear, as the company has not provided any details on the error, it clearly shows our dependency on AI chatbots and their capabilities to handle heavy traffic.
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Frustrated users on X are sharing funny memes, opinions and videos to troll ChatGPT for the outage. Notably, this isn’t the first time that the AI-powered chatbot has thrown an error. Earlier, users have also reported ChatGPT outages on several instances. A couple of months back, over 2,000 users reported the global outage.
Here’s how users have reacted to the issue.