Was ChatGPT down for you on Tuesday? Here’s what happened

Those of you who tried to use ChatGPT on Tuesday likely noticed that the AI wasn’t its usual chatty, responsive self. It wasn’t just you. The service was down for a lot of people.

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If you fired up ChatGPT and submitted any request at the prompt, the AI told you that there was an error in the message stream or that something seemed to have gone wrong. The trouble was the same whether you used the ChatGPT website, the Windows or Mac app, or the iOS or Android app.

At this point, the overall issue has been resolved with just one remaining hiccup affecting ChatGPT voice mode. Otherwise, the AI seems to be back to its usual self. Here’s what happened on Tuesday.

The outage started at 3am ET

Based on data sent by users to Downdetector, the ChatGPT outage started slowly at around 3am ET before spiking at around 5:30am, when the number of reports reached more than 1,000. The volume of reports then dropped before surging again to almost 2,000 later in the morning. (Downdetector is also owned by ZDNET’s parent company, Ziff Davis.)

On its own status page, OpenAI showed that the service was experiencing issues. One status update pointed to elevated error rates and latency affecting ChatGPT, the Sora text-to-video platform, and its APIs. Another update focused on Sora, again indicating elevated error rates.

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

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At 9:07am, OpenAI revealed that it had identified the root cause of the issue and was working on fixing the problem. As of 10:54am., the company said that it was continuing to work on the fix and was seeing some recovery to its APIs. However, full recovery across all its services, including ChatGPT and Sora, could take another few hours, OpenAI added.

By 2pm ET, a full 11 hours after the initial outage, OpenAI reported that it was still monitoring the fix and working toward a full recovery.

Finally, by 6:30pm ET, OpenAI said that the overall problem was resolved with just one remaining glitch: “Nearly all ChatGPT components are now working properly for all users. Please note that we still see an elevated error rate with voice mode and we are working to completely fix this component.”

Alternatives to try

Though the service is up and running now, what do you do if you need a dose of generative AI and ChatGPT is your go-to app? Well, there are several dozen alternatives to try.

Also: The best AI chatbots of 2025: ChatGPT, Copilot, and notable alternatives

Beyond ChatGPT, my favorites are Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic’s Claude AI, and Perplexity. For general questions and requests, Gemini is the one I typically use. If I’m in the mood for an interesting and informative voice conversation, I’ll fire up Copilot directly in Windows. Both Gemini and Copilot come in free and paid versions, but the freebies should be able to handle just about any challenge you throw at them.

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