Is ChatGPT down? Server status as OpenAI goes down for users across the globe - what has the company said?

The issues came late on Wednesday (5 February). According to Down Detector, users began reporting problems at OpenAI around 8:30 p.m.

The San Francisco-based company said it was investigating the issues as users from Japan to Australia were reporting issues. Around 15 minutes later, the company said it was "starting to see recovery in API and Sora," adding: "We are continuing to investigate this issue."

The issue appeared to be resolved just before 12 a.m. EST. A company spokesperson told FOX Business after midnight: "All systems are currently operational."

Users took to X (formerly Twitter) to express their frustration with the outage. One user said: "Is anyone currently able to log into ChatGPT. I was in it and having a discussion. Then, suddenly, everything was gone. I tried deleting cookies and logging in again. It still shows nothing! No previous conversations in the sidebar. No profile info at the top. Just blank”.

OpenAI responded to a major outage on ChatGPT and other applications in late December. The company said the issue had been caused by an upstream provider, which is a company that connects to a local internet service provider’s network to the internet. The company going down on Wednesday comes a day after it said it was rolling out an education-specific version of its chatbot to around 500,000 students and faculty at California State University as it looks to expand its user base in the academic sector and counter competition from rivals like Google’s Alphabet.