ChatGPT had been down for most of the day, creating an unsettling moment for the large number of people that have come to rely on the advanced AI for help with writing and coding, as well as assistance on a variety of topics.
The outage included for paid subscribers of ChatGPT Plus, which was supposed to provide priority status during peak times.
According to the popular website-monitoring service Downdetector, problems started around 1 a.m. PT on Monday, but eased within a couple of hours. A much larger outage began at 8 a.m. and wasn’t fully restored until 7:54 p.m., nearly 12 hours later.
Despite service being back online, there’s some issues still occurring. The latest update on OpenAI’s status page for chat.openai.com says, “We’ve fully restored ChatGPT service to all users. We’re continuing to work to restore past conversation history to users.”
The company that opened the world’s eyes to the potential of AI seemed to be handling a massive surge in traffic very well. The back end is hosted on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.
While service was down, Sahil Lavingia summed up the overall feeling created by the outage in this tweet.
ChatGPT being down in 2023 is like the WiFi being down in 2013.
— Sahil Lavingia (@shl) March 20, 2023
Meanwhile, Bing Chat had been providing quick responses for the growing number of people that have access. Interest in other alternatives, such as Google Bard was booming as well.
This isn’t the first time ChatGPT has had trouble, but it might be the most significant outage it has experienced thus far.
The advanced AI has captured the imagination of the world with its far-ranging capabilities and ongoing improvements. ChatGPT-Plus users, for example, now have access to GPT-4, a much more capable AI model than GPT-3.5. The new system can handle a much larger quantity of text as well as accept images as input.
