This is what ChatGPT itself says about it….
Earlier today, ChatGPT experienced a significant outage affecting users globally. The outage began around 2:30 AM ET and lasted for several hours. Users reported issues accessing the service via web, desktop, and mobile apps, receiving various error messages such as “internal server error” and “we’re experiencing exceptionally high demand” (9to5Google) (TechRadar) (MacRumors).
The problems appeared to be exclusive to ChatGPT’s chat platform, with OpenAI’s API services remaining unaffected. During the outage, there were speculations about a potential DDoS attack, but no official cause has been confirmed by OpenAI (MacRumors) (DailyAI).
The service was partially restored multiple times throughout the day, with full functionality being confirmed later. This marks one of the largest outages for ChatGPT in 2024, highlighting the impact and dependency on AI platforms (9to5Google) (DailyAI).