The status page also indicates that the issues were not limited to ChatGPT alone, with Sora and OpenAI API also affected by the errors. — Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

ChatGPT is back up after a brief outage, with reports to the outage tracking website Down Detector spiking to over 25,000 reports worldwide at its peak.

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot’s owner, acknowledged the issue on its status page, which now indicates that the “incident has been resolved”.

During the outage, those still able to view chats were met with the error message “Internal Server Error”, while others were entirely unable to load the chatbot’s webpage.

The status page also indicates that the issues were not limited to ChatGPT, with Sora and OpenAI API also having been affected.

Users took to X (formerly Twitter) to express their frustration with the outage.

“Is anyone currently able to log into ChatGPT. I was in it and having a discussion. Then, suddenly, everything was gone. I tried deleting cookies and logging in again. It still shows nothing! No previous conversations in the sidebar. No profile info at the top. Just blank,” wrote user @fractalman237.

Another user, @smoofybets, posted “The moment you realize chatgpt is down and you have to use your own brain,” while @ChimneyGriff wrote, “How am I supposed to think with ChatGPT down.”

Others on the social media platform pointed users to try DeepSeek, a competing AI chatbot that has recently become prominent for touting capabilities on par with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

This appears to be the second outage in two weeks for the chatbot, with the previous incident occurring on Jan 23.