Significant malfunctions have struck AI services, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, leading to widespread user complaints about service unavailability. The vulnerability of the ChatGPT system to disruptions of various forms comes under the spotlight as experts suggest a potential large-scale cyber-attack could be behind the second outage of the day.
Downtime and Unavailability
The first reports of the new outage and the unavailability of ChatGPT began to trickle in around 17:30 MSK. Thousands of users, both of the mobile app and web version, complained about connection issues and lack of response from the service. Around the same time, some users encountered problems utilizing Google Gemini, and Claude, a service by the company Anthropic, went out of service as well.
Service Restoration
By 20:17 MSK, OpenAI confirmed the resolution of issues with ChatGPT, restoring service availability to users. Likewise, by 20:30, the functions of Claude and Perplexity AI were back up and running.
Persistent Challenges and Potential Causes
According to The Verge, this is the second large-scale ChatGPT outage in 24 hours, and certainly not the first in the past several months. In November of the previous year, the service experienced a 90-minute downtime which also impacted OpenAI’s API, reportedly due to a DDoS attack. Last month also saw a ChatGPT search function glitch due to Microsoft issues, thereby disrupting the Copilot service.
Experts speculate that the current large-scale issue may be linked to the sharp increase in the popularity of ChatGPT and other AI models in recent months. Companies are having to increase computational power just to maintain stable service under load. Alternatively, it could potentially be another coordinated attack. Official comments from company representatives are awaited.
