ChatGPT Goes Dark in India? OpenAI Breaks Silence on Widespread Outage

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, experienced an outage for thousands of users in the United States on Tuesday, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com. As of 3:25 pm ET, more than 12,000 users had

reported problems with the service, Downdetector data showed. Several users later took to social media on Wednesday, saying they faced difficulties accessing or using ChatGPT. However, the service remained unaffected in India, with users reporting normal access.In the US, a large number of users turned to Downdetector to report complaints and check the extent of the outage. Many said that when they entered prompts into ChatGPT, they were met with an error message reading, “Hmm… something seems to have gone wrong.”“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 reported that switching to other VPNs also helped, as the chatbot appeared to be functioning in Ireland, Canada, India and Poland, though it noted that response times in the latter two countries were slightly slower.

What OpenAI Said On Its Status Page

“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.ChatGPT also confirmed that the outage disrupted nearly all of its features, including conversations, search, image generation, Codex, Atlas and other services. Despite being a relatively new platform, ChatGPT has quickly become an essential tool in many people’s daily lives.The disruption came just a day after OpenAI launched its Codex app for Mac, which saw strong early demand. CEO Sam Altman said the app crossed 200,000 downloads on its first day. As reports of ChatGPT being down spread rapidly, searches for “ChatGPT down” surged on X, with users sharing memes, jokes, and instant reactions. Many joked about having to rely on their own brains, while others humorously said they rushed to X to check whether the outage was global as OpenAI worked on a fix.