Key Takeaways.
- OpenAI’s ChatGPT suffered a major outage on January 23, 2025. This affected thousands of users across the UK and beyond. The outage was caused by the launch of a new interface to allow for better customization.
- This outage showed how much users rely on ChatGPT. There are over 300 million users weekly and a billion messages sent daily.
OpenAI’s AI Chatbot had an error on Thursday, 23rd of January that prevented users from interacting with the chatbot. The usual interface was replaced with an error message that read, “the web server reported a Bad Gateway Error“as reported by several users in the UK at noon. This sudden outage triggered a flood of complaints on Down Detector, a well-known tracking website. This outage, which has more than 10,000 complaintsshows how ChatGPT, with 300 million users each week, is a central part of work and study. According to CEO Sam Altman’s announcement last year, over a billion messages are sent to ChatGPT every single day. It’s hard to imagine how dependent we are on AI just two years after its launch.
Many X users expressed their frustration and disappointment over the unavailability. It was funny to see how users reacted when they were stuck during a coding session, or taking GPT’s assistance to write an article but then having to do the entire work themselves.
- A user wrote on X, “ChatGPT is down in the middle the day I’m about get fired. Pray for me.”
- ChatGPT is down once again? During the day? You’re telling that I have to… THINK? “I’m not sure what you mean by that,” a user joked.
Although the company hasn’t publicly commented on the reason for the outage OpenAIfixed the issue at 15:09 GMT and stated that it was “monitoring the result” on its status page.
OpenAI Introduces New User Interface for Easier Customization
Just a few days before this outage, OpenAI ( ) rolled out a brand new UI (user-interface) on the Web in order to allow better customizations of the chatbot. It is not clear whether this had anything to do the outage.
ChatGPT, launched in 2022, quickly became the fastest-growing launch of all time. Since then it has added many new systems and features to make it more useful and accessible to the audience. The platform was also taken offline during the downtime. ChatGPT charges up to $200 per month for its various membership levels
. OpenAI claims that more than 1,3 million developers in the US have built on these systems. Sam Altman hinted at the possibility of a ChatGPT 5 launch.
OpenAI will have to figure out how to handle the increasing traffic on their platform in order to avoid future outages. Add Techreport To Your Google News Feed.
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Vlad is Tech Report’s Executive Editor. With over a decade of experience in tech content, he’s passionate about computer hardware, an advocate of online privacy, and strongly believes in the open-source, scarce-money nature of cryptocurrency. When he’s not working, he’s traveling with his partner and their cat, learning Python, or reading good books. He never owned a PC he did not build.
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