Is ChatGPT working again? OpenAI’s latest update as users report outages

OpenAI’s ChatGPT experienced some downtime on the intervening night of Tuesday and Wednesday, with reports of issues spiking on outage tracking Downdetector.

Users reported intermittent outages, with some saying that the chatbot was working and others reporting issues.

What issues were reported by users?

While the entire service seemed to be working, several users globally reported problems like lag, timeouts or crashes rather than normal functioning.

“It’s not working. You can only see previous conversations (sic),” wrote one user on Downdetector.

“In Arlington, VA. Got a 500 error message, with all my chats missing and my current conversation is missing. Crap. I was in the middle of a big project. I’ll have to start over. On to ClaudeAI! (sic),” wrote another.

However, the reported issues did not seem to impact users uniformly, and some said that ChatGPT was working fine.

“Ok, ok ok, NOW it’s working (sic),” wrote one user, which was backed by several others.

“It’s working again! I asked it about what happened and it told me the servers had really been unstable for a few minutes,” wrote another.

Netizens also took the opportunity to indulge in some humour amid the reported issues.

“Ugh i can’t do my homework now (sic),” joked one user, while another said, “Now how am I supposed to work!!! Hahahahhahha (sic).”

What has OpenAI said?

While users reported issues with the popular chatbot, OpenAI reported “degraded performance” on ChatGPT, specifically on its Conversations service.

Overall, the downgraded performance issue seemed to be limited just to ChatGPT’s Conversation service, with all other services, such as Deep Research, Image Generation, Codex, File Uploads etc. functioning normally.

“We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services,” Open AI said as users started reporting issues with the chatbot.

“We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” OpenAI added.