Thousands of ChatGPT users were left hanging on Tuesday as a major outage knocked the popular AI tool offline, leaving many staring at a frustrating error screen.
The trouble started around 3:00 PM ET, when people began reporting that the chatbot simply stopped responding. Instead of the usual quick answers, users were met with a blunt message: “Hmm…Something Seems To Have Gone Wrong.”
The Sudden Crash of ChatGPT
According to the tracking site Downdetector, the issues spiked quickly, with over 12,000 reports coming in from users who couldn’t get the service to load or process requests.
Reports say that OpenAI was quick to acknowledge the chaos, updating its official status page to let everyone know they were on the case. In a statement to the public, the company said:
“Elevated error rates for ChatGPT users. Identified Degraded performance. We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation.”
ChatGPT engineerings working to end the error
Basically, the system was overwhelmed by errors, and the engineering team had to scramble to find a way to stabilize it.
For many who rely on the AI for daily tasks like writing emails, coding, or organizing their schedules, the outage was more than just a glitch—it was a major roadblock in their workday. While OpenAI worked on its “mitigation” plan, social media was flooded with people checking to see if they were the only ones being locked out.
Outages like this are a big deal because of how much we’ve started to lean on these tools. When ChatGPT goes dark, it shows just how much a “degraded performance” can impact people’s productivity across the globe. For now, users just have to wait for the green light from OpenAI that the “elevated errors” have been cleared.
