ChatGPT's Worldwide Outage Impacts Thousands
ChatGPT from OpenAI is back up following a significant outage that lasted for roughly forty minutes. The Microsoft-backed software giant revealed that it experienced a 37-minute major outage and a nearly two-hour partial outage on 23 January. The GenAI chatbot experienced higher error rates as a result of a problematic gateway fault issue. At 7:13 PM IST, the business determined the underlying source of the problem and, in roughly one and a half hours, put a solution in place.
According to OpenAI, the chatbot's issues have been resolved as of now. Between 5:53 PM and 8:40 PM, there was an outage. "This problem has been fixed. Customers encountered higher problems on ChatGPT between 4:23 am and 7:10 am PST (5:53 pm and 8:40 pm IST), according to the company. Additionally, OpenAI's API experienced a significant one-hour outage today. By 6:13 PM, a solution to the problem was put into place.
What Exactly Happened on 23 January 2025?
Users who had been accustomed to ChatGPT's fast fixes were in a panic when the largest GenAI chatbot in the world went down worldwide on January 23. About 4,000 Indian users reported that ChatGPT was down for the last hour, according to the outage tracker website Downdetector. It is important to note that 300 million people use ChatGPT every week worldwide. A poor gateway error with reference code 502 was reported by the web server on the website. Usually, the technical issue occurs when a server receives an invalid answer from another server. Server overload, network issues, configuration mistakes, or brief outages on upstream servers are the usual causes of the problem.
On January 23, the firm announced that ChatGPT was experiencing a "Partial Outage" and that it was looking into the matter. For ChatGPT, "we are currently seeing high mistake rates. We're looking into it right now," stated Status of OpenAI.
OpenAI Founding Members of Stargate Project
With a plan to invest $500 billion over the next four years to construct new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States, the Microsoft-backed business announced that it will be one of the founding members of the Stargate Project. Oracle, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Arm will also serve as the organisation's "initial technology partners." In a formal declaration on January 22, OpenAI announced that it would start deploying $100 billion right away. In addition to aiding in the United States' reindustrialization, this project will give the country and its allies a strategic capability to safeguard their national security. This was the fifth significant outage for ChatGPT since December. On December 11, ChatGPT experienced the longest outage, remaining unavailable for 4:10 hours.
Nitin Konde
