ChatGPT outage: Is OpenAI chatbot not working in India? What SamAltman-led tech giant said in its latest update

ChatGPT, the OpenAI chatbot, was down for thousands of users in US on Tuesday, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com. There were more than 12,000 incidents of people reporting issues with the chatbot as of 03:25 pm ET, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. Many users took to their social media on Wednesday to report that they faced issues while using ChatGPT and flagged problems accessing the service. However, ChatGPT did not face outage in India and users were able to access the service.

In the US, large number of users turned to Downdetector to log complaints and check whether the outage was widespread. When users were entering the prompt in ChatGPT, they were met with “Hmm…something seems to have gone wrong" error message.

“Comments on Down Detector note that it’s down in the United States – which is my current experience, though it’s a bit slow – and that it’s still not working internationally, with Hungary specifically noted,” TechRadar added.


The tech outlet further noted that using other VPNs also helped, as the chatbot appeared to be working in Ireland, Canada, India and Poland. “…though the latter two are a bit slower to respond to queries,” it said.

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What OpenAI said

“We’re currently experiencing issues,” OpenAI reported on its status page. Some users may experience issues loading or starting conversations. We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery," it said. “We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation," the company added.

CharGPT also confirmed that the outage was affecting nearly all ChatGPT features, including conversations, search, image generation, Codex, Atlas and other services. Although ChatGPT is a relatively new service, it has become essential in many people’s lives.

The disruption comes a day after OpenAI launched the Codex app for Mac, which has seen strong early demand. CEO Sam Altman revealed that the app achieved more than 200,000 downloads on its first day. As reports of ChatGPT being down spread rapidly, searches for “ChatGPT down" on X surged, with users sharing memes, jokes and quick reactions. Many joked about suddenly having to rely on their own brains, while others humorously noted how they rushed to X to confirm whether the outage was global as OpenAI worked on a fix.

“As soon as anything except Twitter goes down, the only correct course of action is search ‘ChatGPT down’ / ‘Instagram down’ on Twitter to make sure you’re not the only one right?" wrote X user Marc Johnson.

“How fast I came to X Twitter to see if ChatGPT was down #chatgpt," another user posted.