Update January 23, 2025 14:12 pm CET: OpenAI has once again started working on an issue. They confirmed again “elevated error rates for ChatGPT”, and said that another fix has been implemented.
Update January 23, 2025 1:43 pm CET: OpenAI says that the issue has been resolved and confirms that “customers experienced elevated error rates on ChatGPT and the API.” However, some users still are reporting that they cannot access ChatGPT.
ChatGPT appears to be experiencing a global outage. According to Downdetector, a website that tracks online service outages, user reports of ChatGPT being unavailable have spiked dramatically in the last hour, indicating a widespread disruption.
OpenAI’s status dashboard currently confirms that its API services are facing issues as well, saying “We are currently experiencing elevated error rates in the API. We are currently investigating.”
The service disruption has caused confusion and frustration among users who rely on ChatGPT for various tasks, including research, creative writing, and code generation.
The exact cause of the outage remains unknown at this time. OpenAI has yet to make any official statements regarding the disruption. It is unclear how long the outage will last or how many users are affected.
Related: OpenAI To Release o3-Mini Reasoning Model in Weeks
Downdetector Reports Surge in Outage Complaints
Downdetector, which aggregates user-submitted reports of online service outages, has seen a significant rise in complaints about ChatGPT since the afternoon of January 23rd, 2025 (CMT). The outage appears to be impacting users globally, with reports coming in from all major regions.
The specific issues users are encountering vary, but common themes include:
- Inability to connect to the ChatGPT service
- Error messages when attempting to use ChatGPT, including the “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” message.
- Extremely slow response times
“503 Service Temporarily Unavailable”
This error message indicates that the ChatGPT server is currently overloaded and unable to handle the user’s request. This can occur due to high traffic, server maintenance, or other technical issues.
The outage of ChatGPT is likely to have a significant impact on users who rely on the service for various purposes. Students and researchers may face disruptions in their work if they use ChatGPT for tasks such as summarizing complex information or generating creative text formats. Businesses that utilize ChatGPT for customer service or content creation may also experience delays or interruptions in their operations.
Anthropic’s Claude Limits Free Claude 3.5 Sonnet Access Amid Demand Spike
With many users unable to access ChatGPT, some of them are apparently trying to use Anthropic’s Claude as a fallback option, causing the company to limit the free access to its most powerful Claude 3.5 Sonnet model. A message on the Claude website reads:
“Temporarily Switched to Claude Haiku & Concise Responses Due to high demand, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is temporarily unavailable for free plans. We’ve switched to Claude 3.5 Haiku and briefer responses.”
Claude 3.5 Haiku is Anthropic’s smaller AI model optimized for speed, processing over 21,000 tokens per second for prompts under 32K token. It is significantly more cost-effective, with input and output token costs approximately 12 times lower than Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Claude 3.5 Haiku provides faster processing speeds and more cost-effective solutions for high-volume, real-time applications.
