Is ChatGPT down in the US? Thousands of users report outage after being unable to send messages
OpenAI's ChatGPT experienced an outage in the United States, with over 3,200 users reporting issues on Downdetector, unable to ask new questions to the chatbot.
The symbol for a ChatGPT virtual assistant on a laptop computer. In early December, OpenAI executive Ronnie Chatterji said more than a million businesses use the company's tools.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT seemed to have suffered an outage recently in the United States as thousands of users complained about not being able to ask new questions to the popular chatbot. As per outage tracking website Downdetector, over 10,000 complaints were registered on the platform about issues with ChatGPT today.
Downdetector data showed a spike at around 4 PM ET, with around 11,050 complaints being registered by users. The spike fell sharply in the intervening hours to just around 60 reports as users reported being able to once again use the platform.
As per OpenAI’s official status page, it was suffering from ‘elevated error rates for fine-tuning jobs’, but all services have fully recovered now.
How did netizens react to the outage?
“Someone just asked me how my day went and I still haven't been able to reply to them because of this outage,” wrote one user on Reddit.
“My best friend, my therapist, my psychic, my astrologist, my lawyer, my consultant in every lil thing and love messages analyzer is down!!! Please come back, chat!!!!” added another user.
“I got an error message and then tried to ask ChatGPT what it meant, not actually realising the stupidity of the action. I think I have finally become a slave to AI,” yet another user added.
“It’s a global outage; I thought it was only happening to me, so I logged out, uninstalled, and turned off my phone, but I saw that it was a server outage,” added a user.
What other AI app to use?
In case you still can't access ChatGPT, or if you just want to look around for a few alternatives, here are a few options to consider.
1) Gemini:
While ChatGPT remains the number one most-used chatbot globally, Gemini has quickly gained market share over the last year or so. With its Gemini 3 model, the chatbot is widely considered to be among the best in the business, and there is also access to video generation via Veo 3, Deep Research, connectivity with other Google apps, and more.
2) Claude:
Anthropic’s Claude offers similar features to ChatGPT but is generally a favourite among coders.
3) Grok:
xAI’s Grok chatbot has improved drastically over the last year or so and had even briefly overtaken Gemini in a few benchmarks last year. The chatbot is free to use like ChatGPT, with access to the top-end model restricted behind a paywall.
