Representative image. (Photo: Unsplash)

OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot went offline for hundreds of users on Wednesday. According to the Down Detector platform, which tracks such outages based on user reports, there has been a massive increase in reports of users unable to use ChatGPT.

As of this writing, there were 371 reports, which began increasing at 5 a.m. IST (6:30 p.m. Eastern Time). 68% of users reported problems with ChatGPT, 17% with the app and 16% with OpenAI’s website.

Several users posted on social media about ChatGPT’s outage.

“OpenAI API and ChatGPT are down. Should we just… write things now?” I wrote one.

“Chatgpt is down for a few hours, university students have to write their own stuff,” said another.

“Okay, who had?”chatGPT failed‘ on their 12 day Openai bingo card,” wrote another.

What problems do users face?

A user of ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI’s premium and most advanced publicly available chatbot, reported that he was unable to log in to his account. “The OAuth flow appears to have worked, but the /authorize/resume endpoint returns an ‘access_denied’ error…” the user wrote.

Another user said they encountered a “delayed connection error: 111.” A “delayed connection error” typically occurs when there is a delay or error in establishing a connection between two systems or services.

“This is my first time encountering this error with ChatGPT. What kind of demo are you waiting for?” the user wrote.

This is a developing story.