A widespread outage has rendered ChatGPT inaccessible for a large number of users on Tuesday afternoon. The service disruption began around 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time and quickly escalated, with over 10,000 user reports logged on Down Detector by 3:15 p.m.
OpenAI’s status page has confirmed the incident, noting that the outage is affecting the core chat service as well as ancillary features including Browse, Advanced Data Analysis, DALL-E image generation, and the Codex coding tools. The company has acknowledged the issue and is investigating.
The outage follows two significant product developments. On Monday, OpenAI launched a native ChatGPT app for macOS, which CEO Sam Altman reported saw over 200,000 downloads on its first day. Separately, Apple released an update to its Xcode development environment on Tuesday that integrates new AI-powered coding assistance for both OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s models.
While the exact cause of the outage is currently unknown, the timing suggests a possible link to increased user load following the Mac app launch. OpenAI has not stated whether the two events are connected but is working to restore full service.
This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.
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