When thousands of people suddenly started asking “Is ChatGPT down?”, it wasn’t just social media noise — the outage was real. On Tuesday, OpenAI’s chatbot experienced a brief but widespread disruption that left many users unable to send prompts or receive responses. The company quickly acknowledged the issue and pushed out a fix.
ChatGPT Down? Users Report Errors Across the Platform
The outage surfaced early in the day, with Downdetector registering around 3,000 reports of ChatGPT not working. Users saw spikes in error messages and slow or frozen responses.
OpenAI confirmed the problem on its status page, noting that ChatGPT was experiencing elevated error rates. Engineers traced the outage to a routing misconfiguration, which temporarily broke some of the systems handling user requests.
OpenAI Restores Service Quickly
By Tuesday evening, OpenAI said the disruption was fully resolved. The company issued a brief statement explaining the root cause.
“Some users briefly ran into issues using ChatGPT earlier today because of a routing misconfiguration. It’s now fixed,” OpenAI told CNBC.
Users immediately noticed service returning to normal, although some cached errors lingered for a short time.
The ChatGPT Outage Comes After a Recent Security Incident
The sudden “chatGPT down?” event happened only days after OpenAI revealed a security breach involving Mixpanel, one of its data analytics providers.
The breach exposed:
- Names
- Email addresses
- Metadata tied to API usage
OpenAI emphasized that the attacker only accessed a limited dataset, though the company did not specify how many users were affected.
Despite Glitches, ChatGPT Remains Massively Used
ChatGPT still dominates the AI landscape. OpenAI says more than 800 million people now use the chatbot every week — so even brief downtime spreads quickly across social media.
This outage, though short, served as a reminder: millions rely on ChatGPT daily, and even a small routing error can ripple fast.
OpenAI continues to investigate the event to prevent similar misconfigurations in the future.
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