ChatGPT appears to have suffered an outage on Monday morning as users complained of the chatbot being down.
While the AI-powered tool often becomes unresponsive during peak hours due to its servers being at capacity, the latest issue seems to have been more widespread. Even subscribers to the ChatGPT Plus service, which allows access to the bot during periods of intense demand, noted that the service was down on Monday.
Online outage tracker DownDetector reported over 870 user reports of issues with the OpenAI site, which hosts the chatbot.
“@OpenAI Chat GPT is down even for Plus subscribers and my productivity and creativity plummeted significantly... And it is only Monday,” a Twitter user known as @vojta tweeted.
“#ChatGPT is down and I literally forgot how much time writing emails by myself takes,” another Twitter user said.
#ChatGPT is down and I literally forgot how much time writing emails by myself takes 😫 @OpenAI guuurl please get your shit together, it's not that you don't have Microsoft behind you. . .
— Pissenlit 🌻 (@bemvamlebac) March 20, 2023
@OpenAI chatgpt is currently down
— Roger (@RG_energy) March 20, 2023
@OpenAI Chat GPT is down even for Plus subscribers and my productivity and creativity plummeted significantly... And it is only Monday. https://t.co/2zeEMlalnv
— Vojtech Foukal (@vojta) March 20, 2023
OpenAI released two status reports on Monday morning addressing the problem. At 9.18 am, the company said it was investigating an issue. Then, at 9.42 am, it said that the issue has been identified and a fix has been deployed, adding that it will “continue to monitor to ensure the site recovers completely”.
How to tell if ChatGPT is down
As the latest outage and online response indicates, a lot of people already rely on ChatGPT for productivity tasks, despite it only being released in late December.
However, issues with the free service are quite common during certain times of the day. Sometimes, it can even go down altogether due to issues with OpenAI’s servers, which appears to have been the case on Monday.
Normally, the most common type of warning message users of the free version of ChatGPT see is an alert during peak hours.
The error says something along the lines of “ChatGPT is at capacity right now” and appears when there are more people trying to use ChatGPT than OpenAI’s servers can handle.
You are more likely to encounter this error during working hours, both in the UK and elsewhere.
How to use ChatGPT during peak times
There are ways to get around the issue, however. Firstly, you can simply wait for the burden to ease up as people log off and space becomes available for others. Or, you can try to refresh the page and see if that helps. Some have noted that using a virtual private network, or VPN, to change your IP address to look as if you are in another country helps.
Other options include clearing your browser’s cache and cookies, using incognito mode, or subscribing to the $20 per month ChatGPT Plus service to skip the queue (and use the latest version of the bot, GPT-4).
To instantly find out when the chatbot is back up and running, you can set up notifications by pressing a button the OpenAI site.
