ChatGPT Outage: Key Details from Thursday’s Downtime
On Thursday, October 23, 2023, ChatGPT faced a significant outage, causing widespread frustration among users. The issue began around 11 a.m. ET, as confirmed by OpenAI’s official status page, which stated that the service was experiencing increased errors.
Details of the ChatGPT Outage
By 12:40 p.m. ET, OpenAI reported that the service was fully operational again. However, during the downtime, many users took to social media to express their difficulties, indicating they were not alone in encountering issues.
Timeline of Events
- 11:00 a.m. ET: Outage begins, with OpenAI acknowledging elevated errors on its status page.
- 12:35 p.m. ET: OpenAI updates users to say that ChatGPT is now fully operational.
User Reports and Impact
Downdetector, a site dedicated to tracking outages, showed a significant spike in user-reported problems at the height of the outage. Approximately 94% of the reports were specifically related to ChatGPT, while others noted issues with additional services like Grok AI and NordVPN.
Wider Service Impact
Some users speculated that the outage might be linked to a broader cloud service disruption, similar to a recent AWS incident. Additionally, reports highlighted that services like Grok AI began experiencing issues around 11:31 a.m. ET, but they also returned to normal by afternoon.
Speculation and Future Updates
OpenAI has not provided a definitive cause for the outage. Speculation arose connecting it to recent feature rollouts, including the launch of Atlas. As AI services continue to evolve, occurrences like this emphasize the value of exploring alternative chatbots during outages.
For those intrigued by artificial intelligence, updates related to ChatGPT and other services will be provided as more information becomes available. Stay tuned to El-Balad for the latest developments.
