After an hours-long outage that took place in the early hours of the morning, OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot crashed again — but this time, it wasn’t the only AI provider affected. On Tuesday morning, both Claude and Anthropic’s Perplexity started seeing problems, but they were resolved more quickly.
Google’s Gemini appears to be working right now, although it may also have been offline for a while, according to some user reports.
It’s unusual for three major AI providers to all be down at the same time, which could signal a broader infrastructure problem or internet-scale problem, such as those affecting multiple social media sites at once, for example. It’s also possible that Claude and Perplexity’s problems weren’t caused by bugs or other issues, but by receiving too much traffic in a short period of time due to ChatGPT being down.
On the ChatGPT landing page, the ability to send messages to the AI chatbot was not working during its outage. The problem started around 7:33 am. PT and resolved around 10:17 a.m. PT — another hour-long outage.
At some point during the outage, ChatGPT’s website was updated to indicate that the service was up — in pirate language, no less — and offered to notify users when it was back online.
Claude’s website was showing an error with a message that read: “An error occurred rendering the server components. This message is omitted in production builds to avoid leaking sensitive details. This error case includes a summary property, which may provide additional details about the nature of the error.”
The site then advises to “try again”.
Claude started working again sometime after 12:10 p.m. ET.
Perplexity’s website also served the overflow message that would appear when the service received too many requests. It read “We’ll be right back” and “We’re taking a lot of inquiries right now and we’re at capacity. Please come back soon.”
The site continued to work around the time Claude’s outage was resolved, but has been intermittently up and down since then.
It’s worth noting that ChatGPT had only recently resolved a lengthy outage that affected its service overnight. The chatbot had been disabled for users around the world in the wee hours of the morning (Pacific Time), resulting in complaints on X and Threads. The company’s status page said a bug was being fixed and the issue was being tracked at around 12:21am. PT.
As of 7:33 am PT, the status page has been updated to say that ChatGPT is once again unavailable for some users and that OpenAI is “currently investigating this issue”. The chatbot was still working as of 12:28 p.m. ET, according to his status page, which has labeled it a “major outage.” The problems were resolved several hours later.
The AI providers did not immediately return requests for comment or more information about the outages, but we will update as more information becomes available.
The AI disruption isn’t the only online disruption happening right now. Forbes also reports a zero-day spam attack is taking place on TikTok, which is currently affecting select celebrity and brand accounts, including Paris Hilton and CNN.
The post was updated after it was published on June 4, 2024, at 12:20 p.m., 1:35 p.m. ET as Claude and Perplexity came back online, followed by ChatGPT.
