OpenAI’s ChatGPT faces massive outage

The widely-used chatbot ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft and developed by OpenAI, was back online after an outage impacted many users, the company announced on Friday. 

OpenAI stated on its website, “The issues with ChatGPT have been resolved.” 

By 4:34 p.m. PT (0034 GMT on Saturday), most users had regained access, although a few customers continued to experience problems until 5 p.m. (0100 GMT on Saturday), according to OpenAI. 

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, tweeted on X that ChatGPT had experienced a downtime of 30 minutes, expressing a frown emoji and noting, “We are significantly better at reliability than we were before, but we obviously have more work ahead of us.” 

According to Downdetector.com, a site that tracks outages, ChatGPT's services were offline for approximately half an hour, impacting over 19,403 users as of 7:13 p.m. ET (0013 GMT on Saturday). 

Since its debut in November 2022, ChatGPT has garnered 250 million active weekly users. OpenAI's valuation soared to $157 billion from $14 billion in 2021, while its revenue increased to $3.6 billion from nothing, far surpassing Altman's earlier forecasts.