30-Minute ChatGPT Outage Impacts Over 19,000 Users Globally

Over 19,000 users were impacted by a brief but major outage that occurred on Friday on OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Service was back up and running by 5 pm PT (0100 GMT) after the 30-minute interruption because the company fixed the problem quickly.

Some users continued to experience issues until the problem was completely fixed, however, most users began to regain access at approximately 4:34 pm PT.

In a statement, OpenAI verified the restoration, and CEO Sam Altman publicly apologized for the inconvenience, acknowledging the outage. According to Downdetector, a website that tracks service disruptions in real-time, 19,403 customers were impacted by the outage as of 7:13 pm ET.

In an apology post to X (formerly Twitter), Altman said, “ChatGPT went down for 30 minutes today. Despite the brief disruption, OpenAI reassured users that the service had been fully restored.”

Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT has quickly gained a vast user base, with 250 million active users every week.

OpenAI Soars to $157B Valuation, Overcoming Setbacks

With its ability to quickly grow, OpenAI was able to respond quickly to the failure. As a result of its growing influence in the AI industry, OpenAI’s valuation has skyrocketed in the last two years, going from $14 billion to a remarkable $157 billion.

In addition, sales have increased dramatically, hitting $3.6 billion, which is much more than CEO Altman had anticipated. The most recent outage is a small problem on a site that is otherwise growing and becoming more reliable.

Altman was optimistic about OpenAI’s efforts to make its services more reliable, but he also said that there is still a lot of work to be done, especially as ChatGPT continues to grow and change.