ChatGPT Partial Outage Hits Thousands Worldwide

OpenAI's ChatGPT service experienced a partial outage on Tuesday afternoon, February 3, 2025, disrupting access for thousands of users worldwide who rely on the AI chatbot for tasks ranging from writing assistance to coding support.

The issue began around midday Eastern Time, with users reporting elevated error rates that prevented conversations, file uploads, and response generation. According to DownDetector, a website tracking service disruptions, reports peaked at more than 12,000 in the United States before dropping to around 3,700 as the problem eased. OpenAI confirmed the outage on its status page, stating that users were encountering "elevated error rates" for ChatGPT and its broader platform services. The company identified the cause and applied mitigations, marking the main issue as resolved by 5:14 p.m. ET. A separate alert remained active for the fine-tuning component of its API, though OpenAI noted it had implemented fixes and was monitoring recovery.

User experiences varied, with some able to log in but facing delays or incomplete responses, while others received error messages such as "Hmm, something seems to have gone wrong" when submitting prompts. One user on...