Why Is ChatGPT Down Today? Here's Everything We Know So Far

ChatGPT stopped working for thousands of users on August 13 as complaints spiked without warning. Here's what went wrong, which features are affected, and how to fix it now.

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It looks like yet again, ChatGPT from OpenAI has hit the news for all the wrong reasons. The 13th of August saw many of its users facing difficulties in making use of the popular AI chatbot without interruption, thanks to Downdetector's record of a significant rise in the number of complaints. However, what seemed to be a fairly uneventful morning for the services of OpenAI soon became just another episode in a familiar tale - that of ChatGPT breaking down without warning.

A Sudden Spike After a Quiet Morning

Based on figures gathered by Downdetector, however, reports on issues concerning OpenAI jumped all the way to 92 at around 11:59 am. This is definitely a huge difference from the base rate of just two complaints that had been experienced earlier throughout the day. To those who constantly keep an eye on the graphs showing the outages of particular sites, however, it is obvious what this figure represents.

The curve depicting the number of user complaints was relatively flat until that time and only featured sporadic blips which might have been considered nothing but noise. However, the sharp rise in complaints at around 11:59 am indicates quite a different trend. In most cases, a sudden rise in the number of complaints shows a new disruption instead of a problem that gradually developed over hours.

Breaking Down Where the Problems Are Concentrated

It is important to note that not all the OpenAI services were impacted to the same extent by the current outage, and the complaint distribution can provide some valuable insight into the problem areas here. First, ChatGPT itself was clearly hit the hardest, as it accounted for a whopping 63 percent of all the complaints submitted in the past few hours. Not surprisingly, this means that ChatGPT is the most affected OpenAI service today.

Next in line is the web browser experience itself, which accounted for 17 percent of all the complaints. It is possible to assume that users attempting to access ChatGPT directly from their web browser were encountering various loading errors, timeouts, and simply non-responsive pages. Finally, third on the list is Codex, which is the OpenAI code assistant service, and which was responsible for 13 percent of all the complaints.

A Pattern Emerges

If this particular outage strikes you as déjà vu, it’s not because you’ve got some memory issues; it’s just another day on the job for ChatGPT. In fact, ChatGPT has seen no shortage of outages lately, and this particular one seems to be more part of a trend rather than an isolated incident. A quick visit to OpenAI’s Status Page shows a number of entries dating back to late July through early August, all pointing to trouble spots across the platform.

The previous outages have involved high error rates specifically affecting ChatGPT Go conversations – the more affordable version of the chatbot – as well as problems involving unreliable image generation functionality. Problems with Custom GPT actions, the ability to create and deploy your very own version of ChatGPT, have also been mentioned.

Apart from these, OpenAI has experienced some issues with its APIs failing at times, logging problems which kept people from accessing their account, and increased errors that have been showing up all too regularly over the course of the last few weeks. This frequency of disruptions becomes problematic when one takes into account the fact that ChatGPT has become such an integral part of everyday life processes, from essay writing to programmers using Codex to help them code.

What You Can Do If ChatGPT Isn't Working for You

As a current user who is being impacted by today's outage, here are some practical tips that you could try before giving up hope entirely. The first thing that you could do to solve the problem is to simply refresh the page. This should fix any temporary bugs due to disconnection and session expiration.

Another troubleshooting method is to clear the cache of your browser. In this case, some corrupted data is preventing you from accessing the site. Switching between the desktop version of the website and its mobile application could also help because not all outages affect both versions. Finally, the best solution to know what's going on is to check the official status page of OpenAI. They usually acknowledge the problems when they are already aware of the issue and post updates until the problem gets fixed.

OpenAI has not yet made any statements regarding the reason for today’s outage. Taking into consideration the previous experience of the company when it comes to similar issues, the most probable thing that is going to happen is that OpenAI is first going to acknowledge the issue on their status page, and then provide an explanation of the root cause of today’s ChatGPT outage. This article will be updated once OpenAI provides more information on why there was today’s outage and when the problem is going to be solved.

Right now, all that people who use ChatGPT and are faced with the problem need to do is just to wait and follow the tips from above. With ChatGPT becoming one of the most popular AI applications nowadays, it becomes quite clear how dependent both individuals and companies are from it.