It’s not just you. ChatGPT is currently down after an outage began affecting users early on Tuesday. According to OpenAI’s system status pages, the chatbot went offline at around 00:21 PDT “for some users.” It’s morning over in Europe, and I can confirm that ChatGPT is down. I am one of those users. I’m also a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, and the service is not loading for me. Other people have taken to social media to complain about the outage.
It’s unclear what’s causing the service disruptions, but I’ll say it’s not looking good for a company reportedly about to get into bed with Apple. Rumors say Apple chose OpenAI’s ChatGPT for chatbot functionality in iOS 18. The partnership should be unveiled during Apple’s WWDC 2024 event next Monday.
If ChatGPT is somehow integrated into iOS 18, OpenAI might have to deal with a massive influx of new customers. Hundreds of millions of iPhones will get AI features via iOS 18, including support for a built-in ChatGPT service.
Apple is reportedly partnering with Sam Altman & Co. for chatbot services as its own large language models can’t match ChatGPT and Gemini. Google’s chatbot is also an alternative that appeared in iOS 18 rumors, one that Apple might still pursue despite preferring ChatGPT for now.
I’m also a fan of ChatGPT, my go-to chatbot on Mac and iPhone. You can access the chatbot on your iPhone via OpenAI’s iOS app. Well, you can’t access it at the time of this writing as the service is down. What I’m saying is that ChatGPT is available on iPhone regardless of whether Apple packs it into iOS 18 or not.
OpenAI will have to find ways to keep service disruptions to a minimum. Outages should rarely happen despite the potentially massive traffic that might come from iPhone and iPad users.
Issues can happen, but this is the second ChatGPT outage in a matter of days. The previous one occurred on May 23rd, when the service was down for some 8 hours.
Between the outages, OpenAI gave ChatGPT Free users a massive upgrade. Any ChatGPT user has access to GPT-4o, internet browsing, file uploads, data analysis, and support for vision and memory features.
While limits are in place, this upgrade likely put more pressure on OpenAI’s infrastructure. If all of a sudden ChatGPT Free can offer support for more advanced features, plenty of users will likely take advantage of them.
It’s unclear, however, if the May 29th upgrade is to blame for the June 4th service disruptions. We’ll keep updating this post with information as it becomes available. But don’t be surprised if you can’t load ChatGPT on the web, Mac, iPhone, and Android. Also, ChatGPT performance might be more sluggish than usual.
About an hour after the service went down, OpenAI updated its status page to indicate that it had identified the issue and was fixing it. As of 2:00 AM PDT, OpenAI said it was still fixing the issue. ChatGPT is back up on the East Coast and in Europe.
