ChatGPT global outage as OpenAI investigates

OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT experienced a widespread outage on Wednesday that left users in multiple countries unable to receive responses, outage trackers and the company said. Reports of problems began early Wednesday and intensified through the morning and midday in different regions, with OpenAI telling customers the service was "not displaying responses" and that engineers were investigating.

Downdetector, a website that aggregates user reports of online service disruptions, showed a sharp rise in complaints from India around 12:44 p.m. IST, registering more than 500 reports at that time. Users in the United Kingdom, the United States and other countries also filed large numbers of reports, with some platforms showing spikes beginning in the early morning hours in local time zones. OpenAI's status page indicated the Conversations component of ChatGPT as a critical error while most other systems remained operational.

OpenAI posted that it had "identified the root cause and are working to resolve it," but did not provide a timetable for full restoration. The company initially described the problem as ChatGPT "not displaying responses" and said its teams were investigating. In...