ChatGPT back in action after facing global outage amid Ghibli image fever

OpenAI's ChatGPT is back online after a widespread outage that left users facing errors across the chatbot’s app and API services.

The disruption, which lasted for a few hours, came at a time when the platform was experiencing a surge in demand, particularly for Studio Ghibli-style image generation. OpenAI confirmed that it had identified the issue and successfully implemented a fix, as per TOI.

Acknowledging the disruption, OpenAI had earlier said, “We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation.”

The outage affected a large number of users globally, with DownDetector, a platform that tracks online service interruptions, showing a spike in reports regarding ChatGPT’s functionality.

Sam Altman responds: ‘GPUs are melting’

During the outage, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to X (formerly Twitter) to address the situation, attributing the strain on resources to the overwhelming popularity of ChatGPT’s image generation feature.

“Can y’all please chill on generating images this is insane our team needs sleep,” Altman wrote in a post, as users flooded the platform with requests for AI-generated artwork.

When a user suggested limiting the model’s capabilities to ease the load, Altman pushed back, saying, “We are gonna do the opposite of nerfing it BUT still please chill out a bit.”

He also defended his team’s efforts, responding to a suggestion to replace them. “No thanks, in addition to building AGI this team is on trajectory to build the biggest website in the world from a cold start 2.33 years ago, best team in the world, it’s just hard,” the OpenAI CEO said.