SINGAPORE: Thousands of users worldwide reported issues with OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT on Thursday (Jan 23).
Outage tracking site Downdetector.com received over 550 OpenAI outage reports from users in Singapore at around 7.40pm.
Users who accessed the ChatGPT interface were met with a webpage showing the message: “The web server reported a bad gateway error.”
In the United States, where its creator OpenAI is headquartered, users reported over 4,000 outages on Downdetector.com at around the same time.
On its status page, OpenAI stated at 3.54am Pacific time (7.54pm, Singapore time) that it was investigating an “elevated error rate” for ChatGPT and its application programming interface.
An update nearly an hour later said that the issue had been resolved.
However, OpenAI said at 5.12am Pacific time that it was still “experiencing elevated error rates” for ChatGPT and that investigations were ongoing.
A fix was deployed about two hours later, with the company stating it was “continuing to monitor for any further issues”.
ChatGPT similarly faced a global outage in December last year, when it faced “high error rates” for over four hours.
The latest outage also comes after US President Donald Trump’s announcement of up to US$500 billion in private sector investment by OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle to build AI infrastructure in the US.
Trump said that OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle are planning a joint venture called Stargate, which he said will build data centres and create more than 100,000 jobs in the US.
As of August 2024, ChatGPT had over 200 million weekly active users, according to OpenAI.
