On Tuesday morning, thousands of users woke up to find that ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular chatbot, wasn’t working as expected.
Although many could still log in, the replies were painfully slow. Others couldn’t use ChatGPT’s service at all.
A number of frustrated users took to Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) to report the outage.
One common error message popped up: “Something seems to have gone wrong.” And even clicking on the associated ‘retry’ button generated the same response.
The Outage
The trouble started around 3 a.m. ET, according to reports on Downdetector (a site that tracks service issues across platforms).
The site showed a sharp spike in user complaints from around the world: North America, Europe, and parts of Asia all appeared to be affected.
By 5:23 a.m. ET, OpenAI had updated its official status page to show a “partial outage.” Not only was ChatGPT slow or unavailable, but other OpenAI services like Sora (their text-to-video AI tool) and various OpenAI APIs were also impacted.
So far, OpenAI hasn’t given a clear explanation. In a brief statement, the company said it’s “continuing to investigate this issue.” There’s no word yet on what’s behind the glitch or when full service will return.
Not Everyone Is Affected
Interestingly, not all users experienced problems: some could still use ChatGPT without any hiccups.
This inconsistency suggests that the issue may be linked to specific servers, regions, or user accounts.
One Reddit user mentioned that switching browsers helped. Another said they were able to access ChatGPT just fine on mobile, but not on desktop.
Perplexity Takes a Hit
Perplexity, known to rely on some of OpenAI’s models, also experienced an outage. Reports say that the error rate of the search engine is high, and the response rate is slow. This is likely linked to the ChatGPT glitch.
