On Thursday, just hours after OpenAI announced its integration with iPhone, iPad, and Mac, ChatGPT faced a major outage, making the service inaccessible across the world. Minutes after the outage, the company acknowledged the issue and patched the bug, bringing back the AI chatbot. This was the second major service outage by OpenAI, followed by the one from early November.
OpenAI in X post wrote: “We are experiencing an outage right now. We had identified the issue and were working to roll out a fix. Sorry, and we kept you updated!”
ChatGPT was down for almost three hours for users across the world, where users faced issues on the
web and on the app. For now, there was no clarity on what caused this outage. Coincidentally, this
happened just hours after Meta’s WhatsApp and Facebook also witnessed an outage.
The outage prevented millions of users from accessing the chatbot, and people were not happy about it,
especially those who paid $20 for a plus membership or $200 for a pro membership.
Digital services, despite the best efforts from brands, faced outages for a variety of reasons. These
ranged from technical glitches like software bugs, hardware failures, or network congestion, to human
errors in coding or system maintenance, and it was hard to pinpoint an outage to a specific issue unless the maker confirmed the same.
Unexpected surges in user traffic could also overpower servers, leading to slowdowns or complete
outages.
Additionally, external factors such as cyberattacks, natural disasters, or even power outages could
disrupt service availability.
As digital infrastructure became increasingly complex and interconnected, the potential for disruptions, unfortunately, remained a constant challenges.
Article By: Ibn Qalam
About the Author: Ibn Qalam is a budding writer with a keen interest in environmental issues, science and technology, and social matters. He is a contributor to The KashPost.