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ChatGPT back online after global outage, triggers memefest on social media

OpenAI's ChatGPT went down on Thursday evening, disrupting the work of millions of users.

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ChatGPT by OpenAIChatGPT logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 3, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular AI chatbot, suffered a brief outage on Thursday evening, January 23. ChatGPT was reported to be down between 5 pm and 6 pm. The chatbot, which was launched in November 2022, has become one of the most frequently used AI tools around the world. After it went down, social media was flooded with memes and reactions from aggrieved users.

A few ChatGPT users reported seeing a message that read, “We are currently experiencing elevated error rates in the API. We are currently investigating.” Other users who accessed the AI chatbot saw a bad gateway error message.

In its latest update on the outage, OpenAI said, “We have identified the root cause of this issue, and are currently working to implement a fix.”

ChatGPT experienced downtime on Thursday. (Screenshot: Downdetector) ChatGPT experienced downtime on Thursday. (Screenshot: Downdetector)

How the internet reacted to the downtime:

 

Memes aside, cyberattack tracker Falcon Feeds suggested that a threat actor named ‘Mr Hamza’ claimed to have  targeted the ChatGPT website in a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. However, OpenAI has not confirmed the purported cyberattack.

Initially, ChatGPT was based on the GPT-3.5 architecture and it was designed to have human-like interactions. Upon its launch, the chatbot quickly became popular owing to its ability to write, code, and answer any query. In 2023, OpenAI upgraded ChatGPT with GPT-4, enhancing the model’s reasoning abilities and contextual understanding.

Since then, ChatGPT has evolved into a multimodal chatbot with real-time internet access. As of December 2024, ChatGPT reportedly had 300 million weekly active users.

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