OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT chatbot and API suffered a major outage today, leaving many users unable to access the services. The issues resulted in high error rates across ChatGPT and the API, according to the company’s status page. Banners in the ChatGPT interface cited exceptionally high demand as the likely cause of the problems. This comes after similar outages impacted services on Tuesday and Monday. The disruptions follow OpenAI’s recent announcements of new features and expanded capabilities, like the GPT-4 Turbo model. The company’s engineering teams are working urgently to restore services.

Previous outages also impacted services.

This is not the first time OpenAI services have gone down. The ChatGPT chatbot suffered a worldwide outage in May lasting several hours. On Monday, the Dall-E image generation API saw elevated error rates much of the day. The recurring outages highlight the challenges of scaling cutting-edge AI services to meet massive demand.

Scaling Up Capacity, But Challenges Remain

OpenAI announced expanded capacity and capabilities this week, including a new GPT-4 Turbo model and doubled rate limits. But the demand for its services continues to test the limits of its infrastructure. As advanced AI moves into the mainstream, balancing innovation with reliability will be an ongoing issue.