Thousands of ChatGPT users nationwide faced difficulties accessing the app on Tuesday morning and turned to social media for answers. OpenAI confirmed the platform was experiencing issues and, after six hours of investigation, stated, “We have identified the root cause of the elevated errors and latency.”
OpenAI acknowledged the issue, citing "unexpected server instability" as the cause. The company confirmed that services were being restored after addressing an "internal infrastructure overload." No further details were provided about the root cause.
While OpenAI is working on a fix, it remains unclear when full service will be restored.
The crash affected users globally, with reports of connectivity failures, slow responses, and error messages across both free and paid versions of ChatGPT. Monitoring sites recorded tens of thousands of outage incidents within the first hour, with impacts felt in North America, Europe, and Asia.
According to Down Detector, the outage was most severe in the New York City area; user reports on X and other platforms suggested the disruption was more widespread.
The outage disrupted workflows for businesses, students, and professionals who rely on ChatGPT for daily tasks. Similar incidents have occurred in the past, but today’s crash underscores the challenges of maintaining reliability as AI tools become more deeply integrated into work and personal use.
ChatGPT, which launched in 2022, currently serves over 300 million weekly users. According to Yahoo Finance, the platform processes more than a billion messages each day.
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