OpenAI faces major disruption as ChatGPT service fails for thousands

On March 31, 2025, OpenAI faced a significant service disruption primarily affecting its ChatGPT product in the United States. More than 1,100 users reported experiencing issues starting around 9:30 a.m. EDT, with the peak of reports reaching 1,157 just before 9:40 a.m. According to DownDetector.com, a website that tracks outages, 93% of the reports were specifically related to ChatGPT while 6% pertained to OpenAI's website. By 10 a.m. EDT, OpenAI acknowledged the situation on its status page, indicating they were facing increased error rates in ChatGPT and were actively investigating the issues. Shortly after, the status page updated to suggest that the team was working on a mitigation plan to restore service. Reportedly, the outages were exacerbated by bugs affecting new sign-ups in certain areas, impacting not just ChatGPT, but also other OpenAI products including Sora, Playground, and Labs. The service interruption for ChatGPT was accompanied by an error message stating, “something went wrong,” prompting users to refresh their pages as a preliminary troubleshooting step. However, this solution did not resolve the issues for most users, and many remained unable to access the service effectively. The outage occurred shortly after OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, had warned about potential service disruptions due to the massive interest in their new image creation tools, which had led to capacity challenges and increased pressure on existing systems. Despite the widespread disruptions, some users could still access the service normally during the outage, leading to uncertainty regarding the specifics of the service failures. Altman's prior comments about these issues indicated that OpenAI was struggling to cope with the high demand that had begun to strain their operational capacity. This incident raised concerns about the reliability of OpenAI's services, particularly as they continue to expand their offerings amidst increasing user interest.