One ChatGPT user joked they would “actually have to type out my own emails today, send prayers” – as a global outage left thousands unable to log in or load conversations on Saturday morning.
The disruption, which began at around 10am GMT, affected OpenAI’s flagship chatbot as well as its API and coding platform, Codex. Users from the UK, US, India, Japan and Australia reported problems, with major British cities including London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Southampton seeing clusters of complaints.
“Global ChatGPT outage hits thousands as OpenAI scrambles to fix issues.”
DownDetector logged more than 3,000 reports from OpenAI users in the UK alone. Of those, 79% were for ChatGPT, 9% for the app and 8% for Codex. ‘Is ChatGPT down?’ began trending on Google as frustrated users flooded social media with messages about chats and projects failing to load, and warnings of “authentication issues” appearing on screen.
OpenAI’s status page acknowledged the problem, stating that the AI tool was “experiencing issues” and had “elevated error rates”. The company later announced it had deployed a fix: “We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery. Some services are recovering.”
By late morning, OpenAI confirmed that services were gradually returning to normal, though some users continued to report intermittent glitches. The outage, which came without warning, briefly paralysed a tool used by millions for work, study and daily tasks – prompting one user’s darkly comic plea for prayers as they confronted the prospect of drafting emails unaided.