Have you noticed that ChatGPT is a little less chatty this morning? OpenAI is experiencing a widespread outage Tuesday that’s affecting its ChatGPT AI chatbot service, as well as its Sora tool for AI-generated videos. The number of reported outages increased throughout the morning.
An OpenAI representative responded to CNET via email, directing us to its status page, which originally stated that OpenAI is experiencing “elevated errors and latency” and that it has identified the root cause and is working to mitigate the underlying issue.
“Full recovery across all listed services may take another few hours,” an update posted at 10:54 a.m ET (7:54 a.m. PT) said, noting that OpenAI APIs, which allow developers to tap into the company’s AI models, are beginning to recover.
The troubles have been ongoing for 7 hours, OpenAI noted, meaning they likely started around midnight PT.
The Downdetector service also shows outage reports starting around that time and spiking several hours later. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, which is also the parent company of CNET.)
Launched in 2022, ChatGPT has become the most popular AI application ever released, with 400 million weekly users. A barrage of generative AI competitors have followed, including Meta AI, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot, but ChatGPT remains the leader largely because it’s easy to use. At its Worldwide Developers Conference 2025, Apple even touted an expansion of its ChatGPT integration.
The AI chatbot uses learning algorithms and large-language models to process massive amounts of data from books and the internet, which it uses to deliver human-like responses to prompts from users. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
What can you do while OpenAI is down?
Although OpenAI’s ChatGPT may be among the most popular options, there are plenty of alternatives to use while it’s down — and many of them are free.
Chatbots
Claude is our current favorite chatbot we’ve tested, and Claude even knew all the details about ChatGPT’s outage, according to my colleague Jon Reed, a CNET senior editor who covers AI.
Image generators
If you rely on ChatGPT’s Dall-E 3 as your image generator, we’d recommend trying Leonardo.Ai for really creative work and Canva for free, beginner-friendly work.
Video generators
If you’re looking for an alternative to the Sora tool for AI-generated videos, we just checked out Microsoft’s Bing Video Creator. It’s super easy to use and available on mobile now.
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