Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Those of you who’ve tried to use ChatGPT over the past several hours may have noticed that the AI isn’t its usual chatty, responsive self. It’s not just you. The service seems to be down for a lot of people.
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Fire up ChatGPT and submit any request at the prompt. In return, the AI will tell you that there’s an error in the message stream or that something seems to have gone wrong. The trouble is the same whether you use the ChatGPT website, the Windows or Mac app, or the iOS or Android app.
The outage started at 3 a.m. ET
Based on data sent by users to Downdetector, the ChatGPT outage started slowly at around 3 a.m. ET before spiking at around 5:30 a.m. at which time the number of reports reached more than 1,000. Since then, the volume of reports has dropped, but there’s still an ongoing problem. (Downdetector is also owned by ZDNET’s parent company, Ziff Davis.)
Screenshot by Lance Whitney/ZDNET
On its own status page, OpenAI shows that the service is currently experiencing issues. One status update points to elevated error rates and latency affecting ChatGPT, the Sora text-to-video platform, and its APIs, all over the past several hours. Another more recent update focuses on Sora, again indicating elevated error rates.
At 9:07 a.m., OpenAI revealed that it had identified the root cause of the issue and was working on fixing the problem. As of 10:54 a.m., the company said that it was continuing to work on the fix and was seeing some recovery to its APIs. However, full recovery across all its services, including ChatGPT and Sora, could take another few hours, OpenAI added.
By 2 p.m. ET, a full 11 hours after the initial outage, OpenAI reported that it was still monitoring the fix and working toward a full recovery.
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(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Alternatives to try
In the meantime, what do you need if you need a dose of generative AI and ChatGPT is your go-to app? Well, there are several dozen alternatives to try.
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Beyond ChatGPT, my favorites are Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude AI, and Perplexity. For general questions and requests, Gemini is the one I typically use. If I’m in the mood for an interesting and informative voice conversation, I’ll fire up Copilot directly in Windows. Both Gemini and Copilot come in free and paid versions, but the freebies should be able to handle just about any challenge you throw at them.
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