Is ChatGPT Down?

Extremely popular services like ChatGPT are always susceptible to outages and slowdowns as they manage millions of simultaneous users. Thankfully, it’s easy to check for ChatGPT issues by going straight to the source with OpenAI’s status reporting. There are also community-made tools to track more stealthy outages, and if neither of those provides answers, you can turn to community-sourced outage tracking. The final possibility for a weak link in your networking is your internet connection and home network. We’ll walk you through each solution and get you back to prompting in no time!

How to troubleshoot a ChatGPT outage

The fastest and most reliable way to check for a ChatGPT outage is to visit OpenAI’s official status page, as any big issues are usually represented there. From there, we’ll investigate the problem with community and third-party tools. Finally, if you’re still stumped, it’s time to check for more localized issues, like problems with your home network or a local internet provider outage. We’ll walk you through each solution.

Check the official OpenAI status page

OpenAI provides a detailed status page for its services, including ChatGPT, which is the most reliable source for outage information.

Step 1: Go to status.openai.com.

Step 2: Look at the ChatGPT component line. If it shows a yellow bar (Partial Outage) or a red bar (Major Outage), then there’s an outage. You’ll have to wait it out before you can continue using ChatGPT.

Step 3: Click the View History button at the bottom of the page to see if OpenAI recently acknowledged a sudden spike in “elevated error rates” or “increased latency.”

Step 4: Use the Subscribe to updates button in the top-right corner of the page to stay up-to-date on outage and service developments.

Check the Unofficial OpenAI status page

If you suspect the AI is just being incredibly sluggish or throwing errors intermittently, check the Unofficial OpenAI Status Page. This community tool pings the models continuously from external servers and shows the exact tokens per second and real-time error rates. If the error rate graph is spiking, the system is choking.

Step 1: Go to openai-status.llm-utils.org.

Step 2: Find the line representing the ChatGPT model you’re using and use the metrics color code to determine the status (lower values and greener shades represent better performance).

Learn if others are experiencing issues

Third-party down detector pages can tell you how many people have experienced OpenAI outages in the last 24 hours. This is helpful, but also prone to false positives and negatives. Pay close attention to the actual numbers represented. A service as big as ChatGPT is likely to have a consistent baseline of a few users reporting issues at all times. Don’t get me wrong! Down detectors are useful tools, but read the data with a grain of salt.

Check your internet connection

As more of our daily tasks move to online services like ChatGPT, getting the best bang for your buck on your internet plan is more crucial than ever.

These days, it’s easy to find a better deal on internet service, and customers have more options than ever with new technologies. Plug your zip code into the search below and see if there’s a better internet plan in your future.