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Tom’s Guide Global Editor asked ChatGPT why there was a spike in error rates. Here’s what the AI ​​chatbot told him:

“Today’s spike in error rates for ChatGPT was caused by an unexpected spike in traffic and demand, which caused the system to become overloaded. OpenAI acknowledged the elevated error rates starting around 11:20 AM PT and resolved the issue by 1:55 PM PT. This incident primarily affected ChatGPT’s web and mobile applications, causing various error messages and access issues for users on various platforms. OpenAI’s status page initially cited internal server errors and high demand as the main reasons for the outage. They have since restored normal operation to all services, although the specifics of the root cause of the spike were not detailed beyond the high traffic levels experienced at the time of the incident.”

ChatGPT is backed up and seems stable.

Here is the latest update from OpenAI (for now):

Allowed – ChatGPT experienced an increased error rate from 11:20 AM PT to 1:55 PM PT. This is already resolved.

Looks like ChatGPT is working again. The status page from OpenAI has everything in green.

Down Detector reports have significantly decreased and we are seeing reports of people being able to use ChatGPT on X and Reddit.

Here’s a random fun fact that ChatGPT gave us while testing it: Honey never goes bad. Archaeologists have discovered copper vessels in ancient Egyptian tombs that are more than 3,000 years old and still perfect for consumption. Honey’s natural acidity, low moisture content and presence of hydrogen peroxide contribute to its remarkably long shelf life.

ChatGPT may be back online. Spotted by Tom’s Guide global editor Mark Spoonauer, the service says it’s investigating the outage.

Offers a “hard refresh” of your browser or Mac app.

Down Detector is still getting ChatGPT outage reports, but we managed to get it working a bit.

Tom’s Guide Global Editor, Mark Spoonauer, caught something pretty funny about X.

As we posted earlier on this live blog, people are already flocking to ChatGPT alternatives. No surprise #GoogleGemini is now trending on X. One company’s loss is another’s gain, I guess!

A DownDetector user shares his experience. Although you can send a request in ChatGPT, the responses fail to generate. You will get a pulsating black dot instead of a correct answer.

Users on X (formerly Twitter) are still discussing ChatGPT not working. While some are legitimately frustrated, some (like the user posted above) try to downplay the situation.

Still, if you rely on ChatGPT for work, I’m sure you’re having a crappy Monday. We hope this recent outage hasn’t caused anyone any serious problems.

As of 4:15pm it still doesn’t work for me, but it looks like it’s trying. When I enter a query – in this case “are you working?” I get a pulsating black dot for a while before it goes back to an error message.

However, Gemini, Claude 3 and Perplexity seem to work fine.

How to Hard Reset ChatGPT

Even when ChatGPT service is restored, you may still need to perform a hard reset for it to work properly. Here’s what you need to know:

Mac:
In Chrome or Firefox: Press Cmd + Shift + R
In Safari: Press Cmd + Option + R

DESKTOP:
Chrome, Firefox or Microsoft Edge: Press Ctrl + F5

Mobile devices:

Manually clear the cache and reload the page as expected.

Update (4 pm ET): ChatGPT is still down. He seemed to be starting to recover a bit, but progress seems to have stalled. DownDetector’s comments section is also getting a little spicy.

“How am I going to try to use gpt chat to create rules breaking stories for me if Ai doesn’t work,” wrote ThunderChannel 100.

“I asked chatgpt when chatgpt will be fixed. Still waiting for a response,” David wrote.

What is ChatGPT? For those of you who somehow clicked on this story and are wondering what all the fuss is about, ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that can do everything from writing documents to creating images based on text prompts alone , which you enter. Although it launched in 2022, it has gained a lot of popularity as one of the leading AIs in the past year, as companies like Microsoft, Google and Apple have rushed to incorporate artificial intelligence into their products.

Based on the company’s own logs, ChatGPT has had at least one significant outage per month dating back to March. Some were only 30 minutes long, but others lasted more than eight hours.

Our Global Editor-in-Chief Mark Spoonauer is really digging ChatGPT’s very minimalist interface right now. There is no story. There are no answers to your queries. You can just sit back and think about what AI can do for you.

The last time ChatGPT went down, traffic to a number of the best ChatGPT alternatives went up and these services struggled with the increased load as a result. Claude from Anthropic and Perplexity all had their issues; we will also monitor them to see if they are affected by the latest ChatGPT outage.

People also took to Threads to complain about the ChatGPT outage. “I think ChatGPT is playing too much Football Manager,” wrote asherwood21.

Unsurprisingly, many took to social media to air their grievances.

This one tweet from X’s @Egocrata sums up the frustration of many ChatGPT users. “ChatGPT would be MUCH more useful if the damn stupid thing wasn’t off half the time. You can’t rely on him at all.”

The comments on DownDetector paint a pretty bad picture of the latest ChatGPT outage. One user ANA says: “I just used confusion better than this garbage.”

Just last week, OpenAI and Apple announced a partnership where ChatGPT will be integrated into Apple’s own AI platform, called Apple Intelligence, in iOS 18. In this implementation, much of the processing will be done on the device before going to Apple’s servers .

ChatGPT went offline for about four hours on June 4 until engineers were able to fix the problem, but noted that some users would need to do a “hard refresh” to get the service working again.

While we wait for it to return — again — it’s worth checking out our guide to ChatGPT alternatives — including Claude 3 and MetaAI.

Reports of the OpenAI outage appear to have started around 2:00 PM EST, according to DownDetector.

About 40 minutes later, an OpenAI status update noted: “We are currently investigating elevated levels of bugs affecting ChatGPT.”