ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI, experienced a significant outage on Tuesday, with users reporting error messages and performance slowdowns across multiple regions, including New York. OpenAI acknowledged the disruption, attributing it to "elevated error rates" that persisted for several hours.
"Some users are experiencing elevated error rates and latency across the listed services," the company wrote on its service status page around 11:30 a.m. ET. The issue was initially investigated just after 7:30 a.m., and by late afternoon OpenAI said it had identified the root cause and was working on a fix. "Full recovery across all listed services may take another few hours," the company stated around 4 p.m.
Downdetector, which tracks service disruptions through user reports, logged nearly 2,000 complaints about ChatGPT by mid-morning. A heat map indicated the highest concentration of reports originated in and around New York City. Error messages included: "Too many concurrent requests," "A network error occurred," and "Hmmm... something seems to have gone wrong."
One user posted: "Constantly getting 'Error in message stream'." Others said the app was taking unusually long to respond to prompts, or failing to respond altogether.
The disruption comes just two days after OpenAI launched a new Advanced Voice update for paid users, aimed at improving the naturalness and intonation of responses. The company also recently released its GPT-4o image generation model to all users, expanding the platform's capabilities.
OpenAI has experienced explosive growth since the 2022 launch of ChatGPT. As of February, the company reported over 400 million weekly active users and more than 10 million paying subscribers through its ChatGPT Plus tier. It recently announced it had reached $10 billion in annual recurring revenue, doubling from $5.5 billion a year earlier. However, OpenAI also reported a $5 billion loss in 2023.
