ChatGPT was down for a brief time Friday evening although it appeared that users panicked during the outage.
According to Downdetector.com, ChatGPT is experiencing problems. The site reports that the number of user complaints has increased from 28 at 5:48 p.m. ET to an astounding 16,229 at 7:18 p.m. ET. The iOS 18.2 beta is causing this outage for users of the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 16, iPhone 16 Plus, iPhone 16 Pro, and iPhone 16 Pro Max. When ChatGPT is unavailable, you may observe that Siri’s ChatGPT integration—which lets you determine if OpenAI’s chatbot can respond to a question posed to Siri—is not functioning.
Even though OpenAI’s status page states that a remedy was put in place hours ago, as of 3 am ET, ChatGPT is still listed as unavailable. Additionally, according to the page, the chatbot was unavailable from 7:06 p.m. ET to 7:30 p.m. ET, and some users were still unable to access ChatGPT as late as 8 p.m. ET.
Officially, ChatGPT is experiencing “possible problems” at Downdetector, despite the fact that the site’s complaint volume soon decreased after peaking and has since stayed steady. Eighty-eight percent of the complaints came from users who couldn’t connect to ChatGPT, ten percent were regarding the website, and two percent couldn’t log in.
My iPhone 15 Pro Max running iOS 18.2 beta 2 has both the ChatGPT iOS app and the Siri integration back up and working at 3:12 am ET. As previously said, the OpenAI status website still appears to include a red-lettered warning concerning the AI chatbot’s availability, so it’s unclear if certain regions are still experiencing problems. Furthermore, OpenAI has not yet received the “all-clear” sign from Downdetector.
UPDATE: For this reason, we keep pressing buttons. On its status page, OpenAI took down the warning at 3:18 am ET and substituted the phrase “All Systems Operational.” Even though there were only eight reports at 3:07 am ET, Downdetector hasn’t changed its degree of worry. The fact that Downdetector still has OpenAI marked may be due to the fact that the number of complaints is four times higher than the baseline, which is only two for the app.
In a similar vein, Downdetector suggests that YouTube may also be having problems, despite the fact that it doesn’t appear to display the usual pattern associated with an app outage. There is typically a single increase in the number of complaints when that occurs. Throughout the day, YouTube complaints have above the baseline, peaking at just 65 at 10:39 p.m. ET. The fact that there were 23 submissions at 3:09 am ET compared to a baseline of just eight suggests that YouTube users shouldn’t be concerned right now.