OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that search is his favorite feature since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022
AFP

OpenAI's ChatGPT faced a global outage Wednesday, preventing thousands of users from accessing the platform on the app or the website.

The problem affected OpenAI's Sora and ChatGPT API, disrupting services that rely on them. Around 35,000 users reported the issue, according to Downdetector's post on X.

Meanwhile, the company also confirmed on its official status page that its services experienced an outage and assured users that it was looking into the problem. Updates were provided shortly after, with OpenAI mentioning that recovery signs were being observed in its API and Sora services.

OpenAI did not share the exact cause of the disruption, stating that it was looking into the issue and that a fix was already being put in place.

In the latest update, OpenAI reported some partial recovery in certain services, but added it was still working on fully resolving the problem.

The downtime led to many X users sharing their frustration on the social media platform:

This is not the first time that ChatGPT has faced an outage in 2025. On Jan. 23, the official status page mentioned, "We are currently experiencing elevated error rates for ChatGPT. We are currently investigating."

Downdetector reported more than 4,100 outage reports at around 7:40 p.m.

On Dec. 11, OpenAI's services were unavailable for approximately four hours. Similarly, on Nov. 9, ChatGPT experienced a brief outage, affecting over 19,000 users. The users faced increased error rates with logins and account creation on ChatGPT and the API Platform on July 18 as well.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT announced Wednesday that no sign-up was required to use the product. Some users on X saw it as an alternative to Google, while others wondered why they should pay for a membership.

However, one of the users explained that "free users have access to 4o mini, some 4o prompts along with some image analysis (i think up to 4 per a few hours)," while "paid users get almost unlimited GPT 4o usage along with image analysis,50 prompts of O1 per week (the most advanced model in the planet),150 prompts per day of O3 mini and O3 mini high."

ChatGPT, launched in November 2022, gained popularity for its ability to generate human-like text in response to user prompts.

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