The recent outage of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, in January 2025 caused disruptions for thousands of users worldwide. The issue was reported on Thursday, January 23, with users encountering error messages when trying to access the ChatGPT interface.
According to reports, “The web server reported a bad gateway error,” leading to frustration among users in various regions. Outage tracking site Downdetector.com received over 550 outage reports from users in Singapore and over 4,000 reports from users in the United States.
OpenAI acknowledged the problem and began investigating an “elevated error rate” for ChatGPT and its application programming interface. Following an initial fix, the company stated that the issue had been resolved. However, further complications arose, leading to continued “elevated error rates” for ChatGPT. Despite this setback, a fix was successfully deployed after two hours, with OpenAI mentioning that they were monitoring the situation for any additional issues.
This recent outage is not the first incident of its kind, as ChatGPT also faced a global outage in December of the previous year when it encountered “high error rates” for an extended period. Interestingly, the incident follows US President Donald Trump’s announcement of a significant private sector investment in OpenAI, Softbank, and Oracle to develop AI infrastructure in the United States through a joint venture named Stargate.
As of August 2024, ChatGPT boasted over 200 million weekly active users, highlighting its widespread adoption and significance in the AI landscape.
