OpenAI's enterprise AI platform ChatGPT experienced a significant service interruption, impacting thousands of paid and free users worldwide, highlighting potential business continuity concerns.
A major outage of OpenAI's ChatGPT in January 23 affected thousands of users globally, with over 10,000 reports of service disruption in the UK alone, according to Downdetector. The incident, which lasted approximately four hours, impacted both free users and enterprise customers who pay up to $200 monthly for premium access.
The disruption began around 11:00 GMT when users attempting to access the service encountered a "bad gateway error" message. OpenAI acknowledged the issue on its status page, noting that the platform was "experiencing elevated error rates." The company implemented a fix at 15:09 GMT and stated they were "monitoring the results," though they have not yet disclosed the cause of the outage.
This outage comes at a time of significant AI infrastructure investment, with OpenAI among the tech firms that recently pledged $500 billion (£405 billion) for AI infrastructure development in the United States. This investment signals recognition of the need for robust enterprise-grade AI infrastructure to support growing business dependencies on AI services.