ChatGPT is down worldwide with widespread service outages, as the OpenAI ship burns without Sam Altman

What you need to know

• OpenAI has been leading the news cycle in the last week as CEO Sam Altman was fired and removed from the board of directors. 
• Since then, Sam Altman and several others from OpenAI have joined Microsoft.
• The board of directors at OpenAI has been criticized and many are questioning their ability to lead OpenAI without the top leadership.
• Just a few days after these massive changes, ChatGPT seems to be suffering a near-complete service outage.

On the backend of one of the biggest tornadoes of a story in recent memory, ultimately culminating, for now, with Sam Altman joining Microsoft as CEO of a new AI Research division, we have more devastating news for OpenAI. Many people have been wondering if the remaining team at OpenAI will be able to run the giant ship they were left with without the leadership of Sam Altman and Greg Brockman as well as several other senior-level people who moved over to Microsoft. It seems those fears are justified as ChatGPT is currently experiencing an outage that, at least for me, has completely broken ChatGPT and I can’t use it at all. 

Be aware that your mileage may vary with ChatGPT as some are reporting that it is still working fine, but with OpenAI stating they have an issue themselves, this is definitely unfortunate timing for OpenAI’s board as they already look at the best inadequate, and at the worst, like insolent children who threw a tempter tantrum.

For more information about the ongoing story, we are tracking the OpenAI subreddit. As well as OpenAI’s site itself. 

Why is ChatGPT broken?

According to OpenAI’s status page, “the underlying issue is due to an issue with our database replicas.” OpenAI also states that the impact should be minimal and only affect certain endpoints but that doesn’t seem to be reflective of reality. It is likely with the mass exodus they are facing as well as a large portion of their 770 staff threatening to quit, that they don’t have a great response team to resolve to triage, identify, and resolve this issue right now. 

My personal ChatGPT Plus account is down. I can’t see my chat history or generate any responses to my queries. I also tried to use Bing.com/create to create an image and wasn’t able to get that to work either. 

This is an ongoing issue and we will continue to update if there is more information that comes out about any problems behind the scenes that either caused this or exasperated it to make it a bigger issue than it normally would. 

What do you think is going on with ChatGPT and OpenAI? Do you think this outage is due to a lack of staff and leadership? Let us know in the comments.