OpenAI, the leading AI research laboratory, reported a major outage on ChatGPT and Labs today. The incident has caused frustration and inconvenience for many mobile and desktop users worldwide, with some receiving an error message stating that ChatGPT is at capacity and unable to process requests.
If you are a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you may be experiencing issues with accessing the service even with the login link. Desktop users, on the other hand, are redirected to the incident page, which shows OpenAI started investigating the issue at 9:41 a.m. PDT. The root cause of the problem has been identified, and OpenAI is currently working on a resolution.
To alleviate the situation, OpenAI is adding extra capacity to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Paid labs traffic has been restored, and the team is currently working to restore free traffic. However, the company warns that it may take some time before the service is fully operational.
The OpenAI Status page reveals that the Labs service is also experiencing an outage related to an underlying capacity failure. This means that both services have been affected, and users may experience delays in accessing their accounts.
Many ChatGPT Plus users are particularly frustrated as they pay a premium price for "General access to ChatGPT, even during peak times." However, they are currently unable to use the service despite paying for it.
For those who need an alternative to ChatGPT, OpenAI Playground is available as an option. The beta chat mode on this platform uses either GPT-3 or CODEX models, depending on the user's preference. It is worth noting that new accounts receive an initial $18 credit for the OpenAI Playground. However, once you reach your usage limits, you must pay for additional credits. The pricing is per 1,000 tokens, which is equivalent to about 750 words.
Users of ChatGPT can subscribe to updates from the incidents page to be notified when OpenAI has resolved the issue. It is not yet clear when the service will be fully restored, but OpenAI assures its users that they are doing everything possible to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.