ChatGPT recovers following outage affecting thousands of users

AI should be regulated, ChatGPT chief says

Leaders in the artificial intelligence community are calling for a global agency to regulate the rise of AI. "It can go quite wrong," the head of ChatGPT told members of Congress at a hearing on May 16.

OpenAI, known for its chatbot ChatGPT, was down for thousands of users Wednesday.

DownDetector, a service that monitors internet capability, reported widespread complaints from users.

Reports of issues began around 1 p.m. EDT, according to DownDetector.

Most of the reported complaints (86%) were centered around its chatbot ChatGPT. Another 11% of users made complaints about the website, and 3% reported that the app was having issues.

In this photo illustration, the home page for the OpenAI "ChatGPT" app is displayed on a laptop screen. (Credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images)

According to OpenAI, the company began investigating the incident at 1:24 p.m. EDT after experiencing 'elevated errors of requests using vision in ChatGPT and the API."

Around 3:30 p.m. EDT, there were more than 4,000 outages reported.

At 4:10 p.m. EDT, OpenAI said it identified the source of the errors and was working to fix them.

Multiple ChatGPT users shared their frustrations on social media after the Open AI website went down.

"Keep getting network error," one user said.

At 4:49 p.m. EDT, the AI company said errors were continuing to resolve as a result of the fix they deployed. They noted that they were actively monitoring traffic returning to normal in ChatGPT. At 4:56 EDT, OpenAI announced it had resolved the issue.

FOX Television Stations reached out to OpenAI for information. The company said on its website that it was continuing to investigate the factors which led to this incident.

Earlier this month, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook were down for some users thanks to a wider outage at parent company Meta, reports indicated.