Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

ChatGPT is back online after being down for more than 3 hours

Jacob Roach
By

ChatGPT is back offline after being down for over three hours. OpenAI has restored service for free and paying users, but it’s continuing to monitor the service as it comes back online. That might mean you’ll see more “at capacity” messages than normal

The outage only impacted ChatGPT itself. OpenAI’s API and other research websites stayed live, powering ChatGPT alternatives and services like Microsoft’s Bing Chate. In addition, OpenAI’s other models, such as DALL-E 2, stayed online, as well.

ChatGPT error message that its servers are offline.

The outage was due to “database instabilities,” and started rolling out a couple of hours after the servers were taken offline. OpenAI restored service for ChatGPT Plus subscribers first, waiting for around 30 minutes before restoring the service for free users.

Related

Down Detector showed a peak of user reports around 8:30 a.m. PT, as well as a spike around 11 a.m. During this time, OpenAI was testing fixes that allowed some users to access the AI chatbot. However, after discovering the root of the problem, OpenAI temporarily took ChatGPT offline to work on a fix.

Recommended Videos

This is the second major outage ChatGPT has seen in the last 90 days. The service experienced another outage on February 21, which brought down the chatbot for four and a half hours. You can keep an eye on OpenAI’s status page to see when the service becomes available again, as well as subscribe for updates.

Server capacity is one of the biggest issues with ChatGPT right now. OpenAI’s viral chatbot has become overwhelmingly popular, often showing “at capacity” messages when new users try to access the service. OpenAI’s status page shows 17 outages for the API over the past 90 days, some of which lasted over five hours. This could become a larger issue with time, especially as services like Snapchat move to integrate ChatGPT.

Now that ChatGPT is back online, make sure to read our roundup of the best ChatGPT tips to get the most out of your chatting.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Jacob Roach
Jacob Roach
Senior Staff Writer, Computing
Jacob Roach is a writer covering computing and gaming at Digital Trends. After realizing Crysis wouldn't run on a laptop, he…
ChatGPT website traffic has fallen for the first time
A MacBook Pro on a desk with ChatGPT's website showing on its display.

Since the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November, the clever AI-powered chatbot has taken the world by storm as people take the tool for a spin while also speculating about how the technology might transform the workplace and wider society.

But for the first time since ChatGPT landed toward the end of last year, visits to the chatbot’s website have dipped, analytics firm Similarweb said.

Read more
ChatGPT’s Bing browsing feature disabled over paywall access flaw
ChatGPT app running on an iPhone.

OpenAI has disabled ChatGPT’s Browse with Bing feature after some users discovered that it can be used to bypass paywalls, which are often used by news publications to encourage readers to sign up for a paid subscription.

Browse with Bing was available only to subscribers of ChatGPT Plus, the premium tier of OpenAI’s popular chatbot.

Read more
The best AI chatbots to try out: ChatGPT, Bard, and more
Bing Chat shown on a laptop.

The idea of chatbots has been around since the early days of the internet. But even compared to popular voice assistants like Siri, the generated chatbots of the modern era are far more powerful.

Yes, you can converse with them in natural language. But these AI chatbots can generate text of all kinds, from poetry to code, and the results really are exciting. ChatGPT remains in the spotlight, but as interest continues to grow, more and more rivals are popping up to challenge its crown.
ChatGPT

Read more