ChatGPT suffered a widespread disruption on Thursday, with tens of thousands of users reporting problems accessing or using the AI platform as OpenAI investigated issues affecting ChatGPT and Codex.
Reports on outage-tracking service Downdetector rose rapidly, from more than 5,000 shortly before 9pm Bangladesh time to over 22,000 within minutes and then past 43,000, indicating a sharp escalation in the disruption.
OpenAI initially showed no problems on its official status page before acknowledging that it was investigating issues affecting ChatGPT and Codex.
The company had not immediately disclosed the cause.
The disruption came after several service problems in recent days.
Earlier Thursday, OpenAI reported high error rates affecting ChatGPT Work Mode.
That incident began at 6:04am Bangladesh time and was resolved six minutes later.
On Wednesday, the company resolved errors preventing some users from creating new accounts, while ChatGPT Work also experienced elevated errors and latency earlier in the week.
OpenAI notes that its availability figures are aggregated across subscription tiers, models and error types, meaning individual users may encounter problems even when its overall status appears normal.
The scale of Thursday’s user reports made the latest disruption potentially one of the more significant ChatGPT service interruptions in recent days, although the full extent and cause remained unclear.
