ChatGPT suffers extended global outage, OpenAI begins probe into unexplained disruption

ChatGPT, the widely-used AI chatbot by OpenAI, faced a major global disruption on June 10, leaving thousands of users unable to access services for over five hours. This marks one of the longest outages the platform has experienced to date.

The outage, which reportedly began around 12 PM IST, was confirmed by OpenAI through an update on its official status page. The company stated that it is currently investigating elevated error rates and latency issues across its suite of services — including ChatGPT, APIs, and the newly launched text-to-video model, Sora.

“Some users are experiencing elevated error rates and latency,” OpenAI noted, without committing to a specific restoration timeline.

India among worst-hit regions

According to data from outage-tracking platform DownDetector, over 800 reports were filed from India alone in the last few hours, with users citing unresponsive chats, network errors, and the chatbot failing to generate replies despite loading successfully. Reports of issues have also poured in from the US, UK, and other global regions.

The disruption has impacted both free and paid users, including GPT-4 subscribers and users of integrated third-party apps powered by OpenAI’s APIs.

Wider impact and mounting user frustration

The outage has also affected Sora, OpenAI’s cutting-edge AI model for generating videos from text prompts, which has remained unresponsive for nearly 40 minutes at the time of this writing. The dual disruption of ChatGPT and Sora has prompted concerns about the reliability of OpenAI’s infrastructure, especially among enterprise users.

This is the second outage ChatGPT has faced in June. Just days ago, the AI tool’s search feature went down briefly but was restored within hours. However, today’s outage has persisted much longer, fueling user frustration across social media.

On X users expressed a mix of confusion, anger, and humor — flooding timelines with memes, support requests, and speculation about the cause of the crash.

Second major failure in months

OpenAI’s services also suffered a major worldwide outage on February 14, when ChatGPT went offline for over two hours. However, with the current disruption surpassing five hours and no clear resolution in sight, today’s event could go down as the most prolonged service failure in ChatGPT’s history.

As of now, OpenAI has not provided a definitive explanation or estimated time of recovery.