OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT, as well as Meta’s Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram services experienced significant outages in many countries, including the UK, parts of Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and the US.

Due to the ChatGPT outage, millions of users were unable to access the service for almost three hours. Shortly before 7:00 p.m. ET (5:30 a.m. IST) on Thursday, users logging into ChatGPT encountered an error message stating that the service was unavailable. This disruption went beyond ChatGPT and affected the OpenAI API, an important tool for developers, and Sora, another AI-powered service. ChatGPT inventor OpenAI recognized the problem and posted about it on X (formerly known as Twitter). “We are currently experiencing an outage. We have identified the issue and are working to introduce a solution. Sorry, we’ll keep you posted!” the company posted.

According to outage tracking website Downdetector, Meta services also experienced outages around 6:00 p.m. GMT on Wednesday. Over 22,000 users reported problems with Facebook and more than 18,000 experienced problems with WhatsApp.

The outage caused various problems for users, from a complete inability to access the apps to difficulty refreshing feeds. Meta said it was working on a solution shortly after the reports emerged. A similarly large outage occurred in 2021, affecting Meta’s services for almost six hours.

Do ChatGPT, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp work now?

OpenAI claimed to have successfully restored ChatGPT’s services. Meta also confirmed that Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram services had been restored.

Meta confirmed the issue on X, formerly known as Twitter, stating: “Thank you for your understanding! We’re 99% of the way there – just doing a few final checks. We apologize to those affected by the outage.” WhatsApp and Instagram also confirmed they were restoring to are back – sorry for the wait and thank you for putting up with us.”

What caused the failure?

Neither Meta nor OpenAI have publicly disclosed the reason for the outage. However, OpenAI said it had “identified the issue.”

According to TechCrunch, OpenAI’s integration with Apple in iOS 18.2 may have led to an increase in traffic on the company’s servers.

The conversation noted that since the outage affected all of Meta’s products, there could be “a single point of failure: something that all of Meta’s services rely on and without which the services cannot function.”