Widespread AI Disruption As ChatGPT and Grok Go Offline

If you encountered error messages while trying to use ChatGPT on Thursday, you were not alone. The massively popular AI chatbot experienced a significant outage, prompting a flurry of posts on social media from users confirming the service was down. The issue, however, appears to have been resolved.

Widespread Outage Hits Thursday Morning

The disruption began around 11 a.m. ET, with users reporting problems accessing the service. According to Downdetector, a service that tracks website and service outages, there was a massive, vertical spike in user-submitted problems. Hundreds of reports flooded in around noon, with 94% of them specifically related to ChatGPT, rather than other OpenAI services.

OpenAI Confirms and Resolves the Issue

In response to the growing reports, OpenAI's official status page posted an incident notification. The company acknowledged, "We're currently experiencing issues" and noted "Increased errors on ChatGPT conversations." OpenAI confirmed that users were experiencing "elevated errors" and stated it was "working on implementing a mitigation."

By 12:40 p.m. ET, the situation had changed. OpenAI updated its status page to announce that the incident was resolved and the service was "fully operational."

More Than Just ChatGPT Affected

The service disruption was not limited to OpenAI's chatbot. Users on social media quickly pointed out that other AI platforms were also experiencing problems. "ChatGPT and Grok are both down, what is going on? AWS at it again?" one developer posted on X. Another user humorously commented, "ChatGPT is down and I'm going to have to be sent home from work like in the olden days when it snowed."

Data from Downdetector's homepage supported these claims, showing concurrent spikes in user-reported errors for several other services, including AWS, Grok AI, and NordVPN. Grok's own status page confirmed service availability issues starting at 11:31 a.m. ET, though it also reported a return to full operation.

What Caused the Disruption

While OpenAI has not officially stated a cause for the outage, the concurrent failures across multiple platforms led to immediate speculation. Many pointed towards a potential broad cloud outage, similar to a recent AWS incident that affected numerous internet services. Another possibility could be related to new feature rollouts, as OpenAI has been actively launching and updating products.

Throughout the incident, other popular AI chatbot services like Google's Gemini appeared to remain operational. For users heavily reliant on a single AI tool, outages like this one serve as a reminder of the value in exploring alternative services.