OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Labs experienced an outage today. Mobile users report receiving the dreaded “ChatGPT is at capacity right now” message and its outage limerick. ChatGPT Plus subscribers can receive a subscriber login link, which would typically bypass any capacity issues. That option also appears to be broken.
Desktop users receive a link to the incident page for this outage, which shows OpenAI began investigating the issue at 9:41 a.m. PDT. They discovered the root cause of the issue and are working on a resolution.
Screenshot from ChatGPT, March 2023The OpenAI Status page shows that in addition to ChatGPT, Labs is having an outage related to an underlying capacity failure. OpenAI is adding extra capacity to resolve this issue. Paid labs traffic has been restored, and they are working towards restoring free traffic.
Screenshot from OpenAI, March 2023DownDetector also has received thousands of reports from ChatGPT users about the outage, which began several hours ago.
Screenshot from DownDetector, March 2023ChatGPT Plus users are particularly frustrated because the premium pricing plan includes “General access to ChatGPT, even during peak times.”
Some users are turning to the OpenAI Playground while OpenAI resolves the issues with ChatGPT. It offers a chat mode (currently in beta) that can use your choice of GPT-3 or CODEX ******.
Screenshot from OpenAI, March 2023New accounts receive an initial $18 credit for the OpenAI Playground. Once you reach your usage limits, you must pay for additional credits. Prices are per 1,000 tokens, where 1,000 tokens are equal to about 750 words. Pricing varies based on the language model and context needed.
ChatGPT users can subscribe to updates from the incidents page to be notified when OpenAI has resolved the issue by email and text. We will update the post as new information becomes available.
1:30 p.m. PDT:
- OpenAI is allowing some free traffic for Labs while investigating end-to-end request latency. They are also gradually rolling out a fix for some ChatGPT users as capacity allows.
- The login link for ChatGPT Plus users is working again for some users. When you log in, you will see the link to the incidents page, but you can continue to use ChatGPT.
2:30 p.m. PDT:
- ChatGPT service is restored, but conversation history may not be available. The status has been upgraded from a major outage to degraded performance for ChatGPT and a partial outage for Labs.
- OpenAI is rolling back a failed database migration that may have caused the Labs outage.
Featured Image: Vitor Miranda/Shutterstock
