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Is Character AI down? How to fix connectivity issues

Common connectivity problems, and how to fix them

Reviewed By: Kevin Pocock

Last Updated on December 18, 2023
Character AI offline? Here's how to fix your internet connection for online connectivity with the AI chatbot platform.
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With Character.ai down, you’ll have to resort to ChatGPT – heaven forbid. In all seriousness, Character AI provides a customized and characterful AI chatbot experience you won’t get from the OpenAI alternative. Here’s how to check your internet connection and fix some common ‘Character Beta not loading’ issues.

Is Character AI down?

If Character.ai is not loading, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the website (or service) is “down”. It could be your own internet connection!

Beta Character AI is the most popular neural language model chatbot of its kind. In fact, the service hosts many different chatbots – all running on the same proprietary large language model (LLM) technology, but each with a distinct specified personality. This generative natural language processing (NLP) leads to human-like text responses with a bit more… character… than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

When you’re experiencing service disruptions. try these quick and easy fixes:

  • Check your signal strength on your own computer. The most common reason for long loading times is that your ethernet or Wi-Fi connection speed is low. That’s a ‘you’ problem, not an internal server error.
  • Clear your browser cache. It’s possible for your browser to show you a ‘cached’ version of the site, rather than a live one.
  • Disable browser plug-ins.
  • Try a different browser. Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Safari are all popular web browser alternatives.
  • Access Character.ai from a different device. The desktop, iOS, and Android platforms should perform similarly across all services, but if you have both – try both!
  • Add the website to the whitelist of any firewall or antivirus software that you have installed on your device.
  • Use a VPN service to hide your IP (Internet Protocol) address entirely.
  • Try a Character AI alternative.
  • Wait! Sometimes the issue is simply that too many other people are doing the exact same thing you’re doing, at the same time. Try instead accessing the virtual queue during off-peak hours like the early morning (of the country where most users are based – likely the US). This is commonly the case with Beta Character AI, as thousands of users may be interacting with the same chatbot.

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Why is Beta Character AI not working?

Beta Character AI is often under high server load from demanding user traffic. Like any popular start-up that operates (mostly or entirely) through its own website, high traffic and spikes thereof are likely to cause service outages. Server overload happens when a website receives a period of heavy load (that is, high traffic) that it wasn’t prepared for. The Character.ai support team is working on it!

These websites have to pay internet service providers (ISPs) for bandwidth. In the past, that meant a site would pay for server bandwidth that could support its typical number of daily and concurrent visitors, plus a reasonable margin of error for spikes. If traffic went over that margin of error, the site went down for all users. Thankfully, modern times bring flexible plans that scale bandwidth with viewers, meaning that the site will ‘never’ go down – so long as the business running the website is willing to pay whatever cost that unlimited traffic might incur.

AI Chatbot server outages and how to fix them

All web services go down from time to time. Sites and services like Discord and Twitter have millions of daily users and are actually pretty expensive to keep online.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) serves 41.5% of cloud computing services, followed by Microsoft Azure (29.4%), Google Cloud (3.0%), and IBM (2.6%). If any one of these needs to perform maintenance activities, which will routinely be the case to ensure optimal performance, it affects many different websites across the internet. Usually, it is not this big of a deal, however. Unless you get that Cloudflare waiting room screen, it’s probably just a local outage, and waiting a few minutes or resetting the router may fix it.

DNS (Domain Name System) attacks are also a common cause of server outages, and again there’s not much for you to do about them. If technical issues persist then the easiest way to ‘fix’ availability restrictions is to simply wait it out!

Steve is the AI Content Writer for PC Guide, writing about all things artificial intelligence. He currently leads the AI reviews on the website.