Chatgpt Was Down Thursday - What We Know About The Outage

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET

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ZDNET's cardinal takeaways

• ChatGPT knowledgeable a awesome outage connected Thursday morning.
• OpenAI's position page confirmed "elevated errors."
• Update: The incident appears to beryllium complete arsenic of 12:40 p.m. ET. 

If you sewage correction messages while using ChatGPT today, you weren't alone. The celebrated AI chatbot knowledgeable a important outage today, pinch respective users flooding societal media to corroborate it wasn't working.

Errors deed Thursday morning

The outage appears to person started astir 11 a.m. ET.

OpenAI's charismatic position page posted an incident, stating, "We're presently experiencing issues" and "Increased errors connected ChatGPT conversations." The institution confirmed users are experiencing "elevated errors" and is "working connected implementing a mitigation." However, by 12:35 p.m. ET, OpenAI updated its position page to opportunity ChatGPT is "fully operational" and it's "not aware" of immoderate issues.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's genitor company, revenge an April 2025 suit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights successful training and operating its AI systems.)

Also: Is ChatGPT Plus still worthy $20 erstwhile nan free type offers truthful overmuch - including GPT-5?

Downdetector, which is owned by ZDNET genitor institution Ziff Davis, tracks outages for astir sites and services, and it lit up for illustration a Christmas this greeting -- pinch a massive, vertical spike successful user-submitted problems. 

Hundreds of reports came successful astir noon, pinch 94% specifically astir ChatGPT alternatively than different OpenAI services for illustration Sora.

Screenshots by Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET

It wasn't conscionable ChatGPT

Some users connected societal media noted different services mightiness person besides been affected. 

Also: How ChatGPT really useful (and why it's been truthful game-changing)

"Chatgpt and grok are some down, what is going on? AWS astatine it again?" one developer posted connected X. Another user joked, "ChatGPT is down and I'm going to person to beryllium sent location from activity for illustration successful nan olden days erstwhile it snowed."

Downdetector's homepage showed galore different services experiencing user-reported errors aliases outages astatine nan aforesaid time, pinch spikes intelligibly visible for AWS, Grok AI, NordVPN, and more. 

Grok's status page indicated it had work readiness issues starting astatine 11:31 a.m. ET, but it excessively is now afloat operational.

Screenshot by Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET

What happened?

OpenAI hasn't fixed a cause, but speculation immediatelty pointed to a wide unreality outage (like nan AWS incident earlier this week). I wondered if it could beryllium related to caller characteristic rollouts, pinch Atlas launching this week and moreover updates announced for it today.

Either way, Gemini appeared to beryllium moving done nan incident, arsenic were different popular AI chatbot services. So, if you haven't taken nan clip yet to trial nan competition, outages for illustration nan 1 from coming are nan cleanable clip to try.

Also: Is OpenAI's Atlas browser nan Chrome slayer we've been waiting for? Try it for yourself

I've contacted OpenAI and will update this communicative erstwhile I cognize more.

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Editor's note: This communicative was primitively published astatine 11:40am ET connected Oct. 23. It's being updated unrecorded arsenic nan outage unfolds.