Key Takeaways
- On January 23, 2025, OpenAI’s ChatGPT experienced a major outage, affecting thousands of users in the UK and beyond.
- The downtime followed the rollout of a new user interface for better customization.
- The outage highlighted users’ reliance on ChatGPT, with over 300 million weekly users and a billion daily messages.
On Thursday, 23rd January, OpenAI’s AI chatbot faced an error that left the users unable to interact with the chatbot. The usual interface of the platform was replaced by an error window that said, “The web server reported a bad gateway error“, as reported by around several users at noon time in the UK.
This sudden outage led to a surge of complaints on Down Detector – a well-known website tracking website. With over 10,000 complaints, this outage shows how ChatGPT is central to work and study today, with over 300 million people using it every single week.
According to an announcement made last year by CEO Sam Altman, more than a billion messages are sent to ChatGPT every single day. It’s humbling to imagine our dependence on AI within just 2 years of its launch.
Many users took to X to express their disappointment and frustration about the unavailability of the platform. It was interesting to watch how users added humor to the situation when they were stuck in the middle of a coding session or were taking GPT’s help to write an essay but then had to do all the work by themselves.
- “ChatGPT down in the middle of the workday I’m about to get fired, pray for me,” wrote a user on X.
- “ChatGPT is down again? During the work day? So you’re telling me I have to… THINK?!”, joked another user.
While the company has not publicly commented on the cause of the outage, OpenAI implemented a fix at 15:09 GMT for the issue and said that it is “monitoring the results” on its status page.
OpenAI Introduces a New User Interface to Make Customization Easier
It is noteworthy that just a few days prior to this outage, OpenAI rolled out a new UI (user interface) on the web to allow better customization of the chatbot. It is, however, still unclear whether that had anything to do with the outage.
Launched in 2022, ChatGPT quickly grew to become the fastest-growing launch ever and has since added many new features and systems to make it more accessible and beneficial to the audience. Several third-party integrations have been added to the platform as well, which was also taken down during the downtime.
ChatGPT charges up to $200 per month for its various membership tiers, and OpenAI says that more than 1.3 million developers have built on the systems in the US. Sam Altman has already hinted that ChatGPT 5 is in the works and may soon be launched.
It will be interesting to see how OpenAI plans to handle the growing traffic on the platform to avoid such outages in the future.
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Vlad is Tech Report’s Executive Editor. With over a decade of experience in tech content, he’s passionate about computer hardware, an advocate of online privacy, and strongly believes in the open-source, scarce-money nature of cryptocurrency.
When he’s not working, he’s traveling with his partner and their cat, learning Python, or reading good books. He never owned a PC he did not build.
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