Users around the world, including Bulgaria, faced a sudden global outage of ChatGPT on the afternoon of July 19th.
The problems with accessing the developer's popular chatbot OpenAI began to be felt en masse in web traffic monitoring platforms. The AI has become completely inactive for a large portion of its active user base, leaving software engineers, students, and businesses without access to essential work tools.
Timeline of the technical issue
- Start of the crash: The first serious signals were registered around 17:30 Bulgarian time.
- Scale of blocking: The monitoring platform Downdetector reported a sharp spike in complaints from various parts of the planet, with users reporting an inability to load the web interface or critical errors when generating responses.
- Company's reaction: As of 6:10 p.m. Bulgarian time from OpenAI Status confirmed that they are investigating increased levels of errors affecting the web platform and some of the application programming interfaces (APIs).
The incident coincides with a series of technical anomalies on the global network on the same day, with difficulties previously reported on other major platforms such as Facebook.