OpenAI’s ChatGPT and API experienced a major outage Wednesday morning affecting millions of users, two days after CEO Sam Altman’s DevDay, where the company tried to entice developers to build on OpenAI products. This is the longest major outage for the company’s API, the main product used by developers, in nine months according to its outage page.
“A fix has been implemented and we are gradually seeing the services recover. We are currently monitoring the situation,” said OpenAI on its outage page at 10:33 AM in New York, after initially investigating the issue at 8:54 AM. Wednesday’s incident seems to be the first time that both ChatGPT and the API have simultaneously experienced an outage in at least the last six months.
Altman addressed Wednesday’s outage on X, saying the “usage of our new features from DevDay is far outpacing our expectations.” The OpenAI CEO said there will likely be service instability in the short term.
The major outage occurred two days after OpenAI significantly increased its token input by 16x to 128,000 tokens with the announcement of ChatGPT-4 Turbo. The company also updated its knowledge cutoff by almost two years to April 2023, and reduced prices across the board. DevDay, widely considered a huge success, hoped to make ChatGPT the obvious choice for both developers and consumers in a field crowded with AI products.
Despite the patch, ChatGPT users are still reporting difficulty logging into their accounts and using OpenAI’s products on Down Detector as of Wednesday morning. Users also took to X to express their frustration with the outage, noting how dependent they’d become on ChatGPT to get work done.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
OpenAI’s updates this week included the creation of the GPT store, a marketplace for customizable chatbots that looks a lot like the App Store for IOS. DevDay also featured a surprise appearance from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who announced further investment in the OpenAI partnership. Wednesday’s outage was the longest major outage for ChatGPT in the last three months.
“Our job No. 1 is to build the best system so that you can build the best models and then make that all available to developers,” Nadella told OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on stage Monday.
