On Tuesday, June 4, 2024, a widespread outage disrupted ChatGPT services across the globe, causing significant inconvenience for users worldwide. This incident, which started at 2:15p GMT and was resolved at 5:01p GMT impacted all plans of ChatGPT. According to the company, the impact did not include platform.openai.com or the API.

Users experiencing issues took to social media platforms to report problems accessing these services. Many reported being unable to utilize ChatGPT for conversational AI assistance, with many switching to available Meta AI and Google’s Gemini.

During this time, the company’s status page communicated that it was investigating the issue, then identified the problem and was working on mitigating it before announcing that the incident had been resolved.

As of now, OpenAI has not publicly disclosed the cause of the global outage that impacted its services. Similar issues encountered by other technology providers are usually attributed to data center outages, but OpenAI has remained silent.

When widespread outages occur, it is crucial for service providers like OpenAI to maintain transparency and effective communication with their user base. Timely updates on the situation, the cause of the outage, and the estimated restoration time frame can significantly help in mitigating user frustration and ensuring a smoother recovery process.