After a day of chaos, ChatGPT seems to be back up and running again. In the early hours of June 4, ChatGPT abruptly stopped working, instead giving anInternal Servererror. OpenAI’s status webpage reported that the company was investigating the issue.
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After several hours, ChatGPT came back online, only for the service to stop working again a few hours later. Thankfully, it seems to have been fixed again. At the time of writing, the populargenerative AIchatbotChatGPTis back up and running as normal.
How long was ChatGPT down?
It was intermittent throughout the day
The first status update on OpenAI’s website was at 00:21 PDT indicating that there was an issue with the service. At 02:00 PDT, another update indicated that the company was continuing to work on a fix for the issue. At the time of writing, it has been almost three hours since ChatGPT went down. The service did briefly come back again for about ten minutes at around 03:30 PDT but soon stopped working again.
At 04:45 PDT, ChatGPT started working once more, and OpenAI updated the status toResolved. The relief proved short-lived, however. At 07:15 PDT, ChatGPT’s status once again changed back toInvestigatingas the service went down. Finally, at 10.01 PDT, ChatGPT’s status returned toResolvedonce more. At the time of writing, ChatGPT is still up and running.
Could ChatGPT going down be good news?
Are new features imminent?
There’s some speculation that ChatGPT went down because OpenAI is implementing theeagerly anticipated updatesto ChatGPT that were announced at OpenAI’s spring update. These features include an improved voice chat that allows you to get instant responses and interrupt ChatGPT mid-sentence, as well as the ability to show ChatGPT a live feed from your phone and ask the app about anything that’s visible.
However, other AI chatbot services, including Copilot, Gemini, and Claude all also went down temporarily at the same time that ChatGPT was down, indicating that this probably wasn’t a planned outage. Currently, no new features appear to be available in the ChatGPT app and OpenAI has yet to explain the cause of the problems.
How can I tell when ChatGPT is up?
Get status alerts from OpenAI
When the ChatGPT status page is updated, you’ll receive a message via your selected medium with the latest updates, including when the incident is resolved.
What can I do if ChatGPT is down?
Other AI chatbots are available
If you’re desperate to use ChatGPT when it’s down, there are other options available. Bing AI, which runs on the same models as ChatGPT 4, is free and available to use in a browser. Just visitbing.comand click theCopilottab at the top of the screen. You can use Copilot to create images, just like you can in ChatGPT, but you’ll need to be signed in with a Microsoft account.
Alternatively, you can visit thewebpage for Google’s Gemini AI, which is also free to use. You can use Gemini to create images, too, unless you live in the EU, Switzerland, or the UK. There are plenty of other options available, but these are some of the AI chatbots that you can access quickly if you’re in a pinch.
However, at one point both of these services were down at the same time as ChatGPT, leaving us in the strange position of being unable to use AI at all temporarily. It’s a stark reminder that if AI really is going to take all of our jobs, we’d better verify we have a plan for what happens when the service goes down…
