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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- ChatGPT experienced a major outage on Thursday morning.
- OpenAI’s status page confirmed “elevated errors.”
- Update: The incident appears to be resolved as of 12:40 p.m. ET.
If you got error messages while using ChatGPT today, you weren’t alone. The popular AI chatbot experienced a significant outage, with several users flooding social media to confirm it wasn’t working.
Errors hit Thursday morning
The outage appears to have started around 11 a.m. ET.
OpenAI’s official status page posted an incident, stating, “We’re currently experiencing issues” and “Increased errors on ChatGPT conversations.” The company confirmed users were experiencing “elevated errors” and said it was “working on implementing a mitigation.”
However, by 12:35 p.m. ET, OpenAI updated its status page to say ChatGPT was “fully operational” and it was “not aware” of any issues.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Also: Is ChatGPT Plus still worth $20 when the free version offers so much – including GPT-5?
Downdetector, which is owned by ZDNET parent company Ziff Davis, tracks outages for most sites and services, and it lit up like Christmas this morning — with a massive, vertical spike in user-submitted problems.
Hundreds of reports came in around noon, with 94% specifically about ChatGPT rather than other OpenAI services like Sora.
It wasn’t just ChatGPT
Some users on social media noted other services might have also been affected.
Also: How ChatGPT actually works (and why it’s been so game-changing)
“ChatGPT and Grok are both down, what is going on? AWS at it again?” one developer posted on X. Another user joked, “ChatGPT is down and I’m going to have to be sent home from work like in the olden days when it snowed.”
Downdetector’s homepage showed many other services experiencing user-reported errors or outages at the same time, with spikes clearly visible for AWS, Grok AI, NordVPN, and more.
Grok’s status page indicated it had service availability issues starting at 11:31 a.m. ET, but it too is now fully operational.
What happened?
OpenAI hasn’t given a cause, but speculation immediately pointed to a broad cloud outage (like the AWS incident earlier this week). I wondered if it could be related to new feature rollouts, with Atlas launching this week and even updates announced for it today.
Either way, Gemini appeared to be working through the incident, as were other popular AI chatbot services. So, if you haven’t taken the time yet to test the competition, outages like today’s are the perfect time to try.
Also: Is OpenAI’s Atlas browser the Chrome killer we’ve been waiting for? Try it for yourself
I’ve contacted OpenAI and will update this story when I know more.
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Editor’s note: This story was originally published at 11:40 a.m. ET on Oct. 23. It’s being updated live as the outage unfolds.
