Millions of users around the world faced frustration on Tuesday as OpenAI’s ChatGPT suffered major disruptions that slowed or stopped the AI chatbot from working correctly. The company confirmed that it was experiencing technical problems across ChatGPT and other services like the Sora video generation tool and its API systems. 

“According to OpenAI’s status page elevated error rates and high latency were affecting user experience and message delivery.”

The issue persisted for hours and began as early as 3 a.m. Eastern time and was still ongoing by 8 a.m. with users reporting errors on multiple platforms. Downdetector which tracks online outages recorded a surge in complaints going from about 25 to over 1250 within a few hours. That spike represents nearly a 4900 percent increase in user-reported problems.

Outage Sparks Speculation among Tech Experts

Social media platforms like X were flooded with posts about the outage as frustrated users and developers shared screenshots of incomplete or failed messages. One user wrote “When @ChatGPT is so overworked it can’t even finish your message… Today many users (myself included) are facing errors in the message stream. Is @OpenAI having a burnout day?” The outage also affected Sora which had been under investigation for two hours due to similar issues. 

Engineer Gergely Orosz pointed out that other systems such as Heroku and NVIDIA documents were also down and questioned whether the outages were related. This raised concerns that the issue may not be isolated to OpenAI. Many users depend on ChatGPT for daily tasks making the disruption even more impactful. OpenAI has not yet issued a full explanation or timeline for recovery.