‘I Wasn’t Down Myself’: ChatGPT Denies Outage That Impacted Users Today

ChatGPT experienced a brief outage on Monday morning, encountering issues connecting to the internet and responding to questions across devices. According to Downdetector, the outage began shortly after noon and lasted for more than an hour before getting back. While OpenAI has not acknowledged the outage yet, the chatbot said it “wasn’t down myself, but the service might’ve had a temporary glitch or slowdown on your side or mine.”

The downtime sent the internet into a frenzy, with several users storming social media networks to express how dependent they had become on ChatGPT, as a minor outage ended up hampering their work. “ChatGPT is down and I’m forced to use my own brain,” said a user. Another said, “The world comes crashing to a halt when ChatGPT goes down.”

According to the internet outage watchdog, 80 per cent of outage reports were related to issues in using ChatGPT on smartphones and other compatible devices, while those on the chatbot’s website and apps were far less. Several users mentioned that ChatGPT’s response to their queries was slower than usual, but the chatbot stopped working entirely for some users. A few even mentioned that the issues persisted as long as they used Google Chrome to access ChatGPT, but changing the browser worked.

In the absence of an official acknowledgement, the reason behind the outage is anyone’s guess. Going by previous such incidents, an internet-side glitch might have caused the chatbot to stop working. OpenAI’s server status platform has no log of the outage, with the last incident recorded on October 3.

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