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ChatGPT suffers second ‘major outage’ just days after first San Francisco conference

A composite image of the OpenAI logo and a ChatGPT page.
The OpenAI logo is displayed on a phone screen, and the ChatGPT website is displayed on a laptop screen. | Source: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

ChatGPT, perhaps the most popular publicly available artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, is down for the second time Wednesday.  

OpenAI confirmed the outage of ChatGPT and its API—which allows OpenAI’s technology to work with other companies’ tech—on its status page, noting that the company is “currently investigating” the outage. DownDetector, a website tracking online outages, also has thousands of users reporting ChatGPT being out of commission.

CEO Sam Altman attributed the first outage, which took place early Wednesday morning, to OpenAI use “far outpacing our expectations” following the new features launched at DevDay, OpenAI’s first developer conference in San Francisco. At the conference, he touted 100 million weekly active users and 2 million developers.

“there will likely be service instability in the short term due to load,” Altman wrote in a post on X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter. “sorry :/“

Some of the developments announced include boosts to its GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 large language models and user-customizable AI agents the company is branding as GPTs. (Altman noted in his post that OpenAI will have to delay the launch of GPTs to subscribers from an anticipated launch date next Monday.)

Altman has yet to address the second outage of the day.