In brief
- OpenAI's ChatGPT, APIs, and Sora video service have been experiencing a worldwide outage for three hours starting around 3 a.m. EST, with only Playground remaining functional.
- The company acknowledges "elevated error rates and latency" on its status page while investigating, with DownDetector showing hundreds of complaints (93% ChatGPT-related).
- This follows previous ChatGPT outages in 2024 after GPT-4o expansion and Apple Intelligence integration, plus a 2023 DDoS attack linked to Russian hackers.
OpenAI's ChatGPT, APIs, and Sora video service, have been experiencing a worldwide outage for the past three hours, according to the company. That would mean the issues started around 3 a.m. EST.
"Some users are experiencing elevated error rates and latency across the listed services. We are continuing to investigate the issue," the company wrote on its status website.
The only OpenAI service that's currently working is its Playground, which allows users to more finely tune and experiment with AI models.
5 Secret ChatGPT Prompts That Will Turn Your AI Into a Beast
ChatGPT might seem like just another chatbot with a personality, but that's not completely true. Most people don't realize they're using a fraction of its capabilities because they don't know how to ask the right questions—or don’t have the creativity to try new things with their AIs. Prompt engineering—the art of crafting precise instructions for AI—has exploded as users discover that changing how you talk to the machine dramatically changes what you get back. It's like learning the secret hand...
At the time of writing, ChatGPT prompts Decrypt sent through a paid account were being met with "Error in message stream" responses in the browser and through the mobile app.
The DownDetector website shows that hundreds of complaints about error messages have been pouring in, with 93% of them related to ChatGPT.
The company has not yet acknowledged the outage on its X account, where it most recently teased updates to its "Advanced Voice" service. The feature allows users to to have "more natural, real-time conversations" with ChatGPT, rather than typing or using the voice-to-text feature to transcribe their queries.
ChatGPT has experienced outages before. The chatbot went dark this time last year after the company expanded access to its GPT-4o model to free users. Then it happened again after ChatGPT was integrated into Apple Intelligence in December.
Back in November 2023, the company even faced a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack that was thought to be linked to Russian hackers. Even when there haven't been outages, researchers have at times said that the ChatGPT service was getting worse—not better—over time, which runs counter to the promises the company has made about its LLM.
The company's status page shows that ChatGPT service was initially "degraded" starting on Monday, but within an hour the issue was marked as resolved.
