ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot from OpenAI, is down for users around the world. OpenAI has acknowledged the outage and confirmed that it is currently investigating the issue. There seems to be two different angles to this ChatGPT outage story. The issue seems largely concentrated on OpenAI’s website, while the mobile app seems to be working fine.
Opening the ChatGPT website flashes the error, “bad gateway”, hinting at a web server side issue. While on the app, when you ask “ChatGPT, are you down?” it returns with a prompt response saying, “I’m here and ready! What do you need?” It is currently answering the follow-up questions, too.
Downdetector, the website that tracks outages like these, is buzzing with people submitting error reports and taking on the comments section to highlight what’s wrong with ChatGPT. The chatbot remains inaccessible to most users–on the web–along with their history with ChatGPT, which is past prompts and queries.
OpenAI is aware of the issue and in fact identified it, according to fresh information on its status-check website (https://status.openai.com/), where the Sam Altman-led AI company has made two new posts. “The issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented,” followed by “A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.” It isn’t immediately clear what caused the outage.
Interestingly, the outage comes just days after OpenAI rolled out a new UI (short for user interface) on the web updating the backend custom instructions to help users better customise how the chatbot responds to them. Whether, the changes have anything to do with the outage, remains a mystery for now.
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