Update 1:48 PM: OpenAI has updated its status page and claims all systems are operational, but it appears ChatGPT is still suffering from a partial outage. Some users are reporting being able to converse with the chatbot again.

Recently, ChatGPT has been struggling with an outage. Although OpenAI’s chatbot website sometimes loads, no response actually follows any inputs from users.

The outage has only been going on for a short time. However, there have been thousands of reports of a problem since 12:30 AM. There appears to be nothing wrong with the API. Those who manage to reach the website often get “Internal Server Error” as a response back from the website. Currently, “Bad Gateway” appears on the website chat.openai.com or a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable message. Even paying users cannot contact the service through this URL.

ChatGPT also struggled with a global outage in December. At the time, OpenAI confirmed via X that there were problems with the service. At the time of writing, a similar message has not yet appeared this time around. This is not too surprising since the outage has only just begun. It is possible that it will end soon.

The cause for a DoS outage like this is usually too much of a question. OpenAI competitor Anthropic regularly chooses to make some Claude models (such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet) available only to paying users. OpenAI keeps the best LLMs (such as unlimited GPT-4o and o1) behind a pay wall. With ChatGPT Pro, the company even introduced an option for $200 per month, which would be losing even at that price point.

We will update this post when the service is accessible again. In case we’ve not yet spotted that the service is back up, you can always consult OpenAI’s own status page.

Also read: ChatGPT back online after global outage