These of you who tried to make use of ChatGPT on Tuesday seemingly seen that the AI wasn’t its normal chatty, responsive self. It wasn’t simply you. The service was down for lots of people.
In the event you fired up ChatGPT and submitted any request on the immediate, the AI informed you that there was an error within the message stream or that one thing appeared to have gone mistaken. The difficulty was the identical whether or not you used the ChatGPT web site, the Home windows or Mac app, or the iOS or Android app.
At this level, the general difficulty has been resolved with only one remaining hiccup affecting ChatGPT voice mode. In any other case, the AI appears to be again to its normal self. Here is what occurred on Tuesday.
The outage began at 3am ET
Primarily based on knowledge despatched by customers to Downdetector, the ChatGPT outage began slowly at round 3am ET earlier than spiking at round 5:30am, when the variety of experiences reached greater than 1,000. The quantity of experiences then dropped earlier than surging once more to nearly 2,000 later within the morning. (Downdetector can be owned by ZDNET’s father or mother firm, Ziff Davis.)
By itself standing web page, OpenAI confirmed that the service was experiencing points. One standing replace pointed to elevated error charges and latency affecting ChatGPT, the Sora text-to-video platform, and its APIs. One other replace centered on Sora, once more indicating elevated error charges.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s father or mother firm, filed an April 2025 lawsuit towards OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in coaching and working its AI methods.)
At 9:07am, OpenAI revealed that it had recognized the foundation reason for the difficulty and was engaged on fixing the issue. As of 10:54am., the corporate stated that it was persevering with to work on the repair and was seeing some restoration to its APIs. Nonetheless, full restoration throughout all its companies, together with ChatGPT and Sora, might take one other few hours, OpenAI added.
By 2pm ET, a full 11 hours after the preliminary outage, OpenAI reported that it was nonetheless monitoring the repair and dealing towards a full restoration.
Lastly, by 6:30pm ET, OpenAI stated that the general downside was resolved with only one remaining glitch: “Almost all ChatGPT parts are actually working correctly for all customers. Please notice that we nonetheless see an elevated error charge with voice mode and we’re working to fully repair this part.”
Alternate options to strive
Although the service is up and working now, what do you do should you want a dose of generative AI and ChatGPT is your go-to app? Nicely, there are a number of dozen options to strive.
Past ChatGPT, my favorites are Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude AI, and Perplexity. For normal questions and requests, Gemini is the one I usually use. If I am within the temper for an attention-grabbing and informative voice dialog, I will hearth up Copilot straight in Home windows. Each Gemini and Copilot are available free and paid variations, however the freebies ought to be capable to deal with nearly any problem you throw at them.
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