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ChatGPT has more than 100m users across the world, making it the most popular AI chatbot of its kind currently on the market.
OpenAI has fixed an issue that led to ChatGPT being unavailable for some users around the world.
Users of the popular AI chatbot took to social media platforms such as X and Threads to complain about the outage that lasted for several hours today (4 June).
OpenAI confirmed the outage in an update on its website, saying that ChatGPT was down for some users because of an “unresolved incident”.
“We are continuing to work on a fix for this issue,” the update reads. OpenAI said earlier that it had identified the issue and started investigating early this morning.
The latest update confirmed that the incident has been resolved.
ChatGPT has more than 100m monthly active users across the world, making it the most popular AI chatbot of its kind currently on the market. OpenAI has reported intermittent issues with ChatGPT throughout the last 30 days, but the latest outage is the most significant.
OpenAI has also faced a few internal problems in recent weeks.
Last month saw two veteran OpenAI employees – Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike – resign from the company. Sutskever was the company’s chief scientist, while both individuals co-led the company’s superalignment team focused on the safety of future AI systems.
In an X post, CEO Sam Altman responded to criticism about the way OpenAI handles the equity of departing employees and said there was a provision about potential equity cancellation that “should never have been” in any documents or communication.
“This is on me and one of the few times I’ve been genuinely embarrassed running OpenAI; I did not know this was happening and I should have,” Altman said.
Around the same time, Altman came under fire after one of the five voices for a new ChatGPT feature sounded a lot like actor Scarlett Johansson’s AI character in Her, a 2013 film about a man who falls in love with an AI assistant.
In recent months, the company has been forging ties with US and global news organisations including News Corp, Axel Springer, The Atlantic and Vox Media to bring mainstream news to its AI products.
And just last week, OpenAI said it disrupted five “covert influence operations” around the world, including in Russia and China, that were using its AI models to manipulate public opinion and influence political outcomes deceptively.
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Updated, 1.50pm, 4 June 2024: This article was updated to include OpenAI’s announcement that the issue was fixed.
