OpenAI’s widely used AI chatbot, ChatGPT, has suffered a major outage on Tuesday, June 10, leaving thousands of users stranded. As per Downdetector, which collates reports of tech outage, a sharp spike in user complaints pertaining to ChatGPT was seen starting at around 2.45 pm IST. At its peak, over 500 users reported facing disruptions, which ranged from the service being completely unavailable to glitches in loading answers to the platform working slowly.

As per Downdetector, in India, the majority of complaints, at 82%, stemmed from ChatGPT’s core functionality failing, while 14% users faced difficulties with the mobile application, on both iOS and Android. A smaller segment, roughly 4%, reported disruptions in API-linked services. The breakdown mirrored global trends, with the US witnessing even more pronounced issues, at a staggering 93%, with complaints being tied to the chatbot itself. 7% cited app-related problems and a mere 1% flagged login troubles.

As of writing the piece, the disruption has continued and ChatGPT cannot be accessed.

The outage has struck at a critical time for businesses and developers, with Generative AI becoming an integral part of organisations and users, who rely on ChatGPT for tasks ranging from coding assistance to mathematical problem solving to even content generation.

Social media platforms, like X, buzzed with frustration as professionals and students alike scrambled for alternatives. Some even found solace in the medium of memes and many has begun to circulate through X.

Acknowledging the issue, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, wrote on its website: "Some users are experiencing elevated error rates and latency across the listed services. We are continuing to investigate this issue."

This is not the first time ChatGPT has faced downtime. A few months ago, when OpenAI rolled out its new update which enhanced ChatGPT's image generation capabilities, and social media saw a massive influx of users generating images in the style of Studio Ghibli, the platform crashed due to amount of users flocking to the chatbot to generate images for themselves.

As AI tools like ChatGPT become increasingly embedded in daily workflows, such outages underscore the growing dependence on these platforms—and the risks that come with it.