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ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, experienced downtime for many users on Sunday due to a surge in interest surrounding its new Studio Ghibli-style image generation feature. Reports of the outage first surfaced on Saturday night, leaving several users unable to access the service for an extended period. The issue escalated further on Sunday around 4 PM, prompting a wave of complaints on social media from frustrated users.
ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, was down for several users on Sunday with its servers overwhelmed by a surge in demand for its new Studio Ghibli-style image generation feature.
News of the outage started emerging Saturday evening, with some users unable to use the service for a significant duration, but increased on Sunday at about 4 pm, with customers rushing to social media to complain.
Users encountered a pop-up message that read, "We are sorry, an error occurred. Please retry after a few minutes." This message appeared as they tried to access the site, indicating that the application had become quite popular and the rate limit was exhausted.
OpenAI acknowledged the issue, stating, "We have determined that users are seeing high errors for the affected services. We're engaged in putting in a mitigation." In a follow-up update, OpenAI reassured users, saying, "All affected services have recovered in full. A full Root Cause Analysis (RCA) will be released within the next 5 business days."
When one user proposed that restricting the capabilities of the model would discourage users, Sam Altman responded, "We are going to do the opposite of nerfing it, BUT please still chill out a bit." He also stood up for his team when challenged to replace them with, "No thanks; aside from building AGI, this team is on track to build the largest website in the world. It started cold 2.33 years ago. It's the best team in the world; it's just hard."
OpenAI acknowledged the issue and is working on a mitigation plan. All affected services have recovered, and a full root cause analysis (RCA) will be released within the next five business days.
