ChatGPT Outages Leave Millions Stranded: Live Updates & What’s Behind the Sudden AI Blackout

UPDATED 10 JUN 2025 — Thousands of users around the world woke up today to find “network error” messages and blank response windows as ChatGPT experienced one of its largest outages in months. The disruption began shortly after 6 a.m. ET, with Downdetector reports quickly climbing past 1,900 before plateauing just after 8 a.m. WHAT HAPPENED OpenAI’s status dashboard classified the incident as “degraded performance” across both the free and Plus tiers. Engineers “identified the root cause” at approximately 9 a.m. ET and rolled out a mitigation soon after, but periodic errors persisted for some users into the late morning. The company has not provided a detailed technical breakdown, but a spokesperson said internal rate-limiting safeguards “behaved unexpectedly,” blocking legitimate traffic and triggering a cascading failure across multiple regions. GLOBAL REACTION Social-media timelines filled with the hashtag #ChatGPTDown as students, coders and content creators searched for work-arounds. Corporate teams that rely on the API to power chat assistants or draft documents also reported time-outs. “It’s finals week and my entire study plan was built around the bot,” one college student posted on X, echoing dozens of similar laments. PREVIOUS OUTAGES While minor hiccups are common, the last major multi-hour outage occurred almost exactly one year ago in June 2024, when a traffic spike following the GPT-4o preview overwhelmed infrastructure. Industry analysts note that usage typically surges during exam seasons and big developer conferences—both of which are underway this month. IMPACT ON BUSINESSES SaaS startups that embed ChatGPT via the OpenAI API reported latency of up to 30 seconds and completion failures exceeding 25 %. E-commerce chatbots automatically fell back to scripted answers, while some customer-service desks reverted to human agents. “Every minute of downtime costs us real subscribers,” said the founder of a language-learning app. “We’ve built redundancy with other LLM providers, but users notice the difference.” USER TIPS WHILE SERVICE RETURNS • Refresh the browser session or clear cache if you encounter a “network error.” • Switch to GPT-3.5 if GPT-4 and GPT-4o continue to stall; older models recovered first in today’s incident. • Check status.openai.com for official updates rather than unofficial social feeds. • Heavy API users can implement exponential back-off strategies to avoid tripping rate limits. BROADER CONTEXT ChatGPT’s outage arrives at a delicate moment for OpenAI, which is scaling new multimodal features and preparing a rumored enterprise tier. Analysts warn that reliability worries could nudge corporate customers toward rival platforms from Anthropic, Google and Microsoft. “Latency, uptime and predictable quotas matter just as much as model IQ,” said Gartner analyst Priya McAllister in a note to clients, adding that outages can erode trust faster than any new feature can rebuild it. WHAT’S NEXT OpenAI engineers say “monitoring continues” and further fixes will roll out during off-peak hours to prevent recurrence. Users should expect residual slowness while caches warm and request queues normalize. For now, the chatbot is limping back to life, but today’s disruption is a reminder that even the most advanced AI still runs on very human hardware—and all hardware can fail.