If you noticed that ChatGPT was less than its usual chatty self on Tuesday, you weren’t alone: The popular AI chatbot from OpenAI experienced a widespread outage that lasted through much of the day. Wednesday morning, the company reported that «nearly all» components of ChatGPT were working properly again, though it also noted it continues to see an «elevated error rate» with ChatGPT’s voice mode.
In the early going of the outage on Tuesday, OpenAI’s status page reported that the company’s AI systems were experiencing «elevated errors and latency,» that it had identified the root cause and that it was working to mitigate the underlying issue.
The troubles also disrupted access to OpenAI’s Sora tool for AI-generated videos and to the company’s APIs, which developers use to access the back-end AI models and its new Codex software engineering agent. Sora was back online later Tuesday morning, and the APIs had fully recovered by midday.
«We have seen a full recovery in the API. We are monitoring and working towards a full recovery of ChatGPT,» stated OpenAI, in an update posted at 12:34 p.m. PT.
The Downdetector service showed outage reports starting around midnight as Monday changed to Tuesday and spiking several hours later. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, which is also the parent company of CNET.)
We are observing elevated error rates and latency across ChatGPT and the API.
Our engineers have identified the root cause and are working as fast as possible to fix the issue.
For updates see our status page: https://t.co/oUGSSyltRU— OpenAI (@OpenAI) June 10, 2025
Launched in 2022, ChatGPT has become the most popular AI application ever released, with 400 million weekly users. A barrage of generative AI competitors have followed, including Meta AI, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s Copilot, but ChatGPT remains the leader largely because it’s easy to use. During its Worldwide Developers Conference 2025 keynote on Monday, Apple even touted an expansion of its ChatGPT integration.
The AI chatbot uses learning algorithms and large-language models to process massive amounts of data from books and the internet, which it uses to deliver human-like responses to prompts from users. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
What can you do while OpenAI is down?
Although OpenAI’s ChatGPT may be among the most popular options, there are plenty of alternatives to use when it’s down — and many of them are free.
Chatbots
Claude is our current favorite chatbot we’ve tested, and Claude even knew all the details about ChatGPT’s outage, according to my colleague Jon Reed, a CNET senior editor who covers AI.
Image generators
If you rely on ChatGPT’s Dall-E 3 as your image generator, we’d recommend trying Leonardo.Ai for really creative work and Canva for free, beginner-friendly work.
Video generators
If you’re looking for an alternative to the Sora tool for AI-generated videos, we just checked out Microsoft’s Bing Video Creator. It’s super easy to use and available on mobile now.
