'Is ChatGPT down?' Massive outage leaves users locked out worldwide

OpenAI confirmed a widespread ChatGPT outage after users worldwide reported login failures and service disruptions

ChatGPT has resumed normal operations after a widespread outage on Saturday left thousands of users around the world unable to access the AI chatbot.

The disruption began at around 5am ET (10am GMT), with users reporting login failures, missing conversations and error messages across both the ChatGPT website and mobile app. The outage also affected OpenAI's APIs and its AI coding platform, Codex.

During the incident, OpenAI's status page reported that the company was "experiencing issues" and seeing "elevated error rates."

"We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery," the company said in an update as engineers worked to restore services.

The outage prompted thousands of reports on outage-tracking website DownDetector, while searches for "Is ChatGPT down?" surged on Google as users sought answers.

According to DownDetector, 79% of reported issues were related to ChatGPT, while 9% affected the mobile app and 8% involved Codex.

Shortly after midday on Saturday, OpenAI updated its status page to indicate that its services had returned to normal.

"We're not aware of any issues affecting our systems," the company said, confirming that ChatGPT and its related services were once again fully operational.