ChatGPT is down for many – here’s everything we know about the outage so far

Is “biblical” demand to blame?

While OpenAI hasn’t officially commented on what’s causing today’s ChatGPT problems, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the soaring demand for its new image generator has at least had at least some impact.

Sam Altman has been posting increasingly concerned messages to X (formerly Twitter) over the past few days, starting by stating that “our GPUs are melting” from the Ghibli craze on March 28 to a “this is insane our team needs to sleep” yesterday on March 30.

In a reply, Altman added that OpenAI hadn’t been able to catch up with the increased load, adding “biblical demand, I have never seen anything like it”. Well, perhaps OpenAI should have thought of that when it stoked the Ghibli fire.

In our tests, we’ve found that ChatGPT’s image generator is still working, but is very slow going – much like the rest of the AI chatbot today…

Is Gemini having issues too?

Maybe we do need more of those AI chips and GPUs after all – it seems Google Gemini also experienced a minor outage at the same time as ChatGPT, though its issues seems to be largely resolved already.

We noticed error messages like the above in Gemini recently and Downdetector showed a fairly big spike in reported problems at around 9.36am ET / 2.36pm BST. This could point to DNS issues affecting both Gemini or ChatGPT, or it may be unrelated.

Either way, Gemini seems to be back to its old self – while OpenAI is seemingly having a second spike in reported problems, according to Downdetector…

OpenAI acknowledges ChatGPT issue

So it wasn’t just our collective imaginations – OpenAI’s Status page is now showing an “Increased Error Rates” issue for ChatGPT.

The notice states that “we are investigating the issue” but doesn’t provide any more information about a cause, other than it’s been “ongoing for 2hr”.

The description seems to fit our experience – while it isn’t a complete outage for the service, we have certainly been seeing a lot or error messages.

The Downdetector reports seemed to have dropped slightly from their earlier peak, but not by far – with the number hovering at around the 1,000 mark at the timing of writing. Seems like ChatGPT had a heavy weekend on the old Ghibli cocktails…

You may be seeing this a lot today…

It isn’t yet clear what’s causing today’s ChatGPT problems, but OpenAI’s status page says it’s investigating a live incident.

The problems seem to be intermittent and producing a variety of lovely symptoms, including the “something went wrong” message above and the classic “upstream connect error” (always a favorite) on the mobile app.

While it’s a bit too soon to blame the Studio Ghibli image craze, it’s hard to ignore the timing of Sam Altman’s increasingly panicked X posts telling us to stop making so many…

When did the problems start?

According to Downdetector, the latest ChatGPT outage started at around 9am ET / 2pm BST, when we saw a big spike in reports in both the US and UK.

The issues are seemingly intermittent, with the main problems including “something went wrong” error messages in ChatGPT’s browser version and “upstream connect errors” in the mobile app.

We’ve seen both issues on the TechRadar team, though it doesn’t appear to be a complete outage that’s affecting everyone equally…