Is OpenAI down? At the time of writing, the company’s servers appear to be experiencing widespread outages and access issues. This could mean that you’ll struggle to access ChatGPT, as well as the AI image-generator DALL-E. Why is there an issue and what’s going on? We’ll tell you what we know below, and suggest steps to get back to using your favorite tools.
Is OpenAI down?
On Tuesday, September 26th, Downdetector noted a series of outages across OpenAI services, starting at around 2:40 AM ET, and spiking to 46 reports (significant compared to the standard ‘1 report’ baseline) at around 4:56 AM ET.
Outages or issues connecting appear to be ongoing at the time of writing, meaning that OpenAI servers are likely to be struggling for some users, and OpenAI services be down for those users as a result. The current issues come the day after OpenAI announced additions to ChatGPT of voice and vision modes. However, OpenAI’s own server status page currently reports no incidents for September 26th.
Why such a difference exists is unclear. At the time of writing this article, Downdetector’s outage report had spiked again at around 6:30 AM ET, suggesting ongoing troubles.
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Why is OpenAI not working?
Although it’s often easy enough to verify that there are issues with a company’s services – by using a down detector or spotting many others experiencing issues on social media – ‘why?’ is far trickier. Unless OpenAI offers an explanation as to why its services may be down, we can only speculate. Such issues may relate to server load and a spike of interest, perhaps following an announcement.
However, there are more usual reasons as to why OpenAI may be down for you. It could be you’re experiencing the ChatGPT at capacity error, or you’re finding ChatGPT is just not working. There are steps that you can try to ensure the issue isn’t on your end. But, if outages are detected and others are also having or reporting issues, the answer is likely yes, OpenAI’s services are impacted.
How do I get OpenAI to work?
If you continue to struggle to access OpenAI services, we’d recommend trying the steps in the guides linked above to verify that the issue isn’t on your end. Such steps as confirming your Internet connection is stable are sensible, and you can clear your browser cache too. But it may just be a case of waiting for the issues to be resolved and trying again later.
