ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot from OpenAI, has been hit by significant outages, leaving millions of users unable to access its services for several hours. The disruption, which started at approximately 6:30 PM WAT (West Africa Time) on December 26, 2024, has sent waves of frustration through its global user base.
Reports on social media flooded in quickly, with users across different regions experiencing issues ranging from unresponsive chat windows to error messages like “internal server error.” While some noted that ChatGPT would load briefly, it failed to answer queries, rendering the chatbot effectively useless.
By 7 PM WAT, OpenAI acknowledged the outage in a public statement. According to the company’s status page, “ChatGPT, the API, and the text-to-video generator Sora are currently experiencing high error rates.” This acknowledgment confirmed that the problem wasn’t isolated to a specific group of users but was a global issue affecting several of OpenAI’s key products.
Rising Tensions and Repeated Outages
As the evening wore on, OpenAI provided an additional update at 7:18 PM WAT, clarifying that the cause of the outage stemmed from an “upstream provider.” The company assured users that it was actively monitoring the situation and working on a fix. However, with no clear timeline for resolution, users were left in limbo.
By 8:06 PM WAT, OpenAI confirmed that efforts were ongoing to restore services, but still, no specific timeframe had been given for when normal functionality would resume. The company’s latest statement did little to ease growing concerns. “We are continuing to work on a fix,” OpenAI said, but without a firm commitment to the restoration of service, the situation seemed increasingly dire.
This incident is not the first time that OpenAI has faced disruptions to its popular chatbot. Just weeks earlier, a widespread outage affected both ChatGPT and its new text-to-video tool, Sora. Users were left frustrated as both services went down for extended periods shortly after Sora was made available to paid subscribers.
The outage in June 2024 was another notable incident, which also left many users without access to ChatGPT for several hours. This latest failure, however, has led to more widespread backlash, with some questioning OpenAI’s ability to maintain the stability of its services as demand continues to rise.
Users Express Frustration
The sudden crash has caused significant frustration among users worldwide, many of whom rely on ChatGPT for work, research, and even leisure. One user from Lagos, Nigeria, shared their frustration on Twitter: “How can a tool I depend on daily for my work just stop working without any notice? It’s the second time this month! It’s not reassuring.”
In response to these mounting complaints, some users have taken to social media to voice their dissatisfaction, calling the outages “unacceptable” and demanding transparency from OpenAI regarding the cause of the disruptions and how they plan to prevent them in the future.
As the AI industry continues to grow, OpenAI, which is considered a leader in the field, faces increasing scrutiny. The rise of its products, especially ChatGPT, has brought AI into the mainstream, but it has also exposed the limitations and vulnerabilities of AI infrastructure. With millions of people now using AI for both professional and personal tasks, even short-term outages can cause ripple effects across industries. OpenAI’s chatbot has become an essential tool for many, from assisting with customer service inquiries to generating content for websites, blogs, and social media. Its potential uses have sparked a rapid evolution of the digital economy, but incidents like this raise serious questions about the stability and reliability of AI tools that are touted as the next big technological breakthrough
