ChatGPT was down in the UK — the outage as it happened

ChatGPT was down for users in the UK

News
By last updated
ChatGPT on iPhone
(Image: © Shutterstock)

ChatGPT was down for users in the UK, and users voiced their frustrations on Downdetector — reporting issues with one of the best AI chatbots.

Tom's Guide verified the outage does not affect users in the US, and this seemed to just be a UK-only problem, as users are hitting an "Error in message stream" message.

Now that it's back up, let's take a look at how this quick outage played out.

Latest updates

Refresh

BREAKING: OpenAI seems to be back up and running in the UK

That was quick! In our own testing across several UK team members, it seems as if OpenAI has fixed the problem and ChatGPT is back up and running! We'll keep an eye on whether there are any new roadbumps with this mitigation that seems to have solved it for now...

The spike's coming down

OpenAI

(Image credit: Downdetector)

Something must have happened with the "mitigation" OpenAI was implementing, because it looks as if the outage is on its way out. I'll give it another test now!

The app seems to be working in the UK

ChatGPT

(Image credit: OpenAI)

In one bit of good news, it seems like the ChatGPT app on smartphones is working, whereas the desktop and website apps are not. Also, enjoy some corny dad jokes!

Problem identified by OpenAI

OpenAi

(Image credit: OpenAI)

OpenAI's status page was updated a few minutes ago identifying the problem.

"We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for ChatGPT conversations," the status page reads. "We are working on implementing a mitigation."

No it's not global

We're seeing publications talk about this being a "global outage," but it's not. As independently verified by our team members from across the globe, this is impacting UK users only at the moment.

What are users seeing?

ChatGPT

(Image credit: Future)

Anytime we've tried to write up a prompt to request something, we've been hit with this in the UK. Sometimes the answer is half-completed — only for this to appear!

That's a big spike...

OpenAI

(Image credit: Downdetector)

A quick look at Downdetector shows the big spike in the amount of reports that ChatGPT is down for users in the UK. Over in the US, there seems to be no reports as of yet...