Mass ChatGPT Outage: Users Unable to Log In or Sign Up

ChatGPT has run into a large-scale outage: users are unable to sign in, create new accounts or load their conversation history, including previously saved dialogues. According to BleepingComputer, the problems began around 8:00 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, August 19, and affected users worldwide, including in the US and Europe.

On the surface, the glitch looks like this: the ChatGPT interface hangs on the sidebar's loading animation, and any attempt to send a message returns a “too many concurrent requests” error. Signing up and logging in at chatgpt.com also fail.

Other OpenAI services were hit as well

The outage wasn't limited to the chatbot. It affected the Codex coding platform as well as OpenAI's API: on the company's status page, problems were flagged for 12 API endpoints at once. As a result, the issue struck not only ordinary users but also developers whose applications rely on OpenAI's infrastructure.

The company promptly acknowledged the trouble and posted a notice on its status page. According to OpenAI, a login issue affecting several services had been identified, and the company was “working on implementing a mitigation.” About fourteen minutes after the incident began, it was marked as “identified,” yet as of publication it remained unresolved — the outlet's tests were still hitting errors.

Major disruptions to cloud IT services have lately become a familiar backdrop: other popular platforms have gone through similar outages. For the millions of users accustomed to keeping ChatGPT close at hand for work and study, even a brief period of unavailability turns into a tangible inconvenience.

Source: Bleeping Computer