Is ChatGPT Down? Second “Major Outage” of Week Hits Thousands

A major outage shut a range of users across the world out of ChatGPT - but OpenAI now says it's operational once more.

ChatGPT has only just recovered from the serious downtime it suffered on Tuesday, yet another “major outage” has now been reported this Thursday (August 31), with the OpenAI status page currently noting an “unresolved issue” resulting in “degraded performance” of the popular chatbot.

OpenAI says: “Some users are experiencing issues loading conversation history and creating new conversations. We have identified the issue and are working on a remediation.”

In addition, more than 3,000 US ChatGPT users have reported problems via the Down Detector website, alongside over 1,000 UK users. The spike in ChatGPT issues today is obvious to the naked eye.

While you wait for OpenAI to fix ChatGPT, there are lots of things you can do if ChatGPT is down, including using other chatbots that have similar capabilities, such as Google Bard and Claude 2.

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ChatGPT Outages: Everything We Know So Far

Today's ChatGPT outage is the second experienced by the service this week. It was logged officially by OpenAI at 06:52 PDT on Thursday, August 31, with an update shared at 7:58 PDT saying that the company was “continuing to work on a remediation and [to] recover service.”

Earlier in the week, at 7:04 PDT on Tuesday, August 28, the OpenAI Status page was updated to suggest that ChatGPT was experiencing a “partial outage”, although no further information about the nature of the outage was provided.

After that, at 7:46 PDT, the page was changed to suggest there was in fact a “major outage”. The cause has been identified, according to OpenAI, who simply said that they were “investigating this issue”.

OpenAI then said that they were implementing and monitoring their own fix, which seems to have worked – according to the status page, all systems are now operational. Tech.co then  confirmed that multiple accounts that were blocked an hour ago are now accessible again.

Stay tuned, as we'll continue to update this article with the latest news on ChatGPT going down today as it becomes available.

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Thousands of Users Report Incidents

Over five thousand users in the United States reported issues with ChatGPT via downdetector.com on August 28th, with almost 1,000 UK users doing the same. Worldwide, a huge number of people seemed unable to access ChatGPT. Users in other countries also reported issues.

Some users have reported being “blocked” from the service together, with the landing page no longer accessible. Others have simply been served “service unavailable” messages, or witnessed the chatbot refusing to load at all.

blocked from chatgpt

According to the OpenAI, with the fix now implemented, the app is recovering and systems are operational once more.

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Written by:

Aaron Drapkin is a Lead Writer at Tech.co. He has been researching and writing about technology, politics, and society in print and online publications since graduating with a Philosophy degree from the University of Bristol five years ago. As a writer, Aaron takes a special interest in VPNs, cybersecurity, and project management software. He has been quoted in the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, The Daily Mail, Computer Weekly, Cybernews, and the Silicon Republic speaking on various privacy and cybersecurity issues, and has articles published in Wired, Vice, Metro, ProPrivacy, The Week, and Politics.co.uk covering a wide range of topics.

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