Explained: What Is Behind ChatGPT's Frequent Outages

ChatGPT, OpenAI's widely used AI chatbot, is currently facing a major global outage, the fifth such disruption reported this year. The latest interruption in service, still ongoing, affected millions of users across several countries, including India and the United States. The disruption caused significant downtime for users trying to access not only ChatGPT but also Sora, OpenAI's AI-powered video-generation tool.

What Happened?

The June 10 outage began around 3:00 pm, with users reporting issues accessing ChatGPT. Downdetector logged over 800 complaints in India within the first hour - 88 per cent about unresponsive chats, 8 per cent linked to the mobile app, and 3 per cent to API glitches. In the US, 93 per cent of users reported chatbot errors. Many encountered messages like "Hmm...something seems to have gone wrong" and "A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again."

OpenAI confirmed the issue, saying that both ChatGPT and Sora were facing "elevated error rates and latency." While the company noted that it was actively investigating the cause, it did not provide a timeline for when the service would be fully restored. Users were advised to monitor the status page for updates.

Reasons Behind The Outage

The causes are layered, according to reports from The Verge, The NY Post, and information from OpenAI's own engineers.

First is the massive demand. ChatGPT, especially after the release of GPT-4o, has become deeply embedded in daily life for students, professionals, developers, and businesses. Millions rely on it to generate content, write code, manage schedules, and even handle customer service. When this user base surges unexpectedly the system can get overwhelmed.

Second, the architecture of ChatGPT is highly centralised. This means a failure in one server cluster or software component can cause a domino effect across the network. Some outages have been caused by problems with load balancing, backend software updates, or cloud resource bottlenecks.

OpenAI is still rapidly scaling its tools, and infrastructure hasn't always kept pace with the platform's popularity. The addition of Sora and other AI tools has added pressure to the same backend systems.

OpenAI ChatGPT Outages In 2025

1. January - An unannounced minor outage affected login services and memory features.
2. March - A nearly three-hour blackout disrupted ChatGPT and Sora in large parts of Asia and Europe.
3. April - A viral trend involving Ghibli-style image prompts caused a huge usage surge, degrading performance across the board.
4. May - A system update triggered backend failures affecting ChatGPT API and plugin functionality.
5. June 10 - The biggest outage and long-lasting yet, affecting millions of users globally with no immediate fix available.