ChatGPT Suffers Global Outage, Login and Registration Restored After One Hour

Around 8:00 PM Eastern Time on Wednesday, April 19, 2023, OpenAI's widely used artificial intelligence platform, ChatGPT, suffered a sudden and widespread global outage, impacting tens of thousands of users across the United States, Europe, and other regions.

During the outage, users were completely unable to log in to existing accounts or register new ones. The system displayed technical error messages such as 'unable to fetch authentication verification keys' or 'Bad Gateway.' Additionally, many web-based users reported issues including failure to load past conversation histories, sidebars stuck in continuous loading spinners, and inability to send messages.

While some sources indicated that services like the API and Codex remained unaffected, other reports suggested that these platforms also experienced abnormal error responses.

The incident triggered widespread concern across social media. Monitoring site Downdetector saw a surge in outage reports, and Google search trends showed a spike of over 3,250% in searches related to 'ChatGPT outage.'

OpenAI promptly acknowledged the issue on its official status page and initiated emergency repairs. Approximately one hour after the incident began—by 8:54 PM ET—the company announced that all affected services had been fully restored and were operating normally again.