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OpenAI’s ChatGPT suffered a global outage earlier today, leaving users scrambling for answers and Studio Ghibli trend enthusiasts reeling.
The sheer volume of requests pushed the system beyond its limits, triggering widespread disruptions across OpenAI’s app and API services.
OpenAI issued a statement, saying, "We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation."
However, the developer has updated saying all impacted services have been "fully recovered".
Altman says 'please chill y'all'
The latest update to ChatGPT -- designed to generate stunning Ghibli-style animated avatars -- had sparked a creative frenzy, flooding social media with dreamlike, hand-drawn aesthetics.
And no one was more exasperated than OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself.
"Can y'all please chill on generating images this is insane our team needs sleep,” Altman pleaded on X, his frustration evident.
Hours later, he doubled down in response to another user: “We just haven’t been able to catch up since launch so people are still working to keep the service up. Biblical demand, I have never seen anything like it.”
People are running after the Ghibli-esque masterpieces, and loving the newfound ability to craft dreamlike worlds with just a few prompts.
But as demand skyrocketed, the system began to buckle.
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Downdetector says...
Reports flooded DownDetector, an online outage tracker, with at least 229 complaints about OpenAI’s service disruption.
A staggering 59% of those reports were tied directly to ChatGPT failures, leaving users staring at error messages instead of the whimsical illustrations they had envisioned.
For a company accustomed to high traffic, the scale of this meltdown was unprecedented.
Altman's alarm
Just days before the crisis, Altman had already sounded the alarm: “Our GPUs are melting,” he had warned, explaining that OpenAI was temporarily introducing rate limits in a desperate bid to keep the system from collapsing entirely.
Thirty minutes after OpenAI formally acknowledged the issue, the company finally announced: "All impacted services have now fully recovered. The detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) will be published in the next 5 business days."
If Altman’s words are any indication, OpenAI’s engineers might not be getting much sleep anytime soon.