ChatGPT has a Thursday lie down

OUTAGE Reactivate your brain. ChatGPT has gone down.

The generative Artificial Intelligence chatbot fell over on Thursday. Its developer, OpenAI, reported "elevated error rates" on its status page, although, to be frank, that could equally be applied to the output of users that lean a little too heavily on the service.

While the company did not elaborate on the root cause, it went on to say it was "working to implement a fix." At the same time, users hit refresh in the hope that the dread "bad gateway" error might go away and be replaced by a cheery prompt, ready to churn out responses to questions.

The outage appears widespread. Users in the UK started encountering problems just before midday, and others in the USA also encountered difficulties accessing the service. A glance at social media shows users affected worldwide.

At its peak, thousands were complaining about the service and were presumably faced with the horror of having to do their day-to-day work without the assistance of OpenAI's chatbot.

OpenAI's latest status update was that it was "continuing to work on a fix for this issue," which will be of scant comfort to all those developers suddenly having to switch back to Stack Overflow for their coding needs.

The Register contacted OpenAI for more details about the outage and the fix being implemented, but the company has yet to respond. We also asked Microsoft's Copilot why ChatGPT might be down. The chatbot merely confirmed the outage and said, "I know it can be frustrating when you're trying to use the service and it's not working. Is there anything specific you were hoping to use ChatGPT for today?"

The timing of the outage is unfortunate, coming shortly after the announcement of the $500 billion Stargate infrastructure project. Still, it does serve to demonstrate how fragile AI infrastructure can be, so perhaps those billions will be a wise investment. ®