ChatGPT Outage: Service Down on Jan 23, 2025. Learn about the potential causes (DDoS or technical glitch) and the latest updates from OpenAI on the service disruption.
ChatGPT, a popular large language model chatbot developed by OpenAI is currently experiencing an outage. Users attempting to access the service are encountering “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” and “Bad gateway – The web server reported a bad gateway error” error messages on both desktops and smartphones.
According to ChatGPT’s status page, the outage began around 3:33 AM PST on Thursday, January 23rd, 2025. The status page indicates that OpenAI is aware of the issue and is currently investigating the cause. A “Bad Gateway” error means the server you’re trying to reach couldn’t get a proper response from another server it needs to communicate with.
OpenAI has not yet commented on whether the outage is the result of a technical glitch or a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS attack is a malicious attempt to overwhelm a website or service with traffic, making it unavailable to legitimate users.
Given its massive user base of over 200 million weekly active users, ChatGPT is a prime target for cyberattacks. In February 2024, a group called Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for a DDoS attack that coincided with another service outage.
At this time, it is unclear how long the outage will last. OpenAI has provided updates on their status page throughout the morning, indicating that they are working to resolve the issue.
The information available on the status page does not definitively identify the cause of the outage. While a DDoS attack is a possibility, it is also equally possible that the outage is due to a technical glitch.
For your information, the sudden onset of the outage and the “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” error message could be indicative of a DDoS attack. However, there is no confirmation from OpenAI to support this.
On the other hand, technical glitches can also cause outages. The fact that OpenAI has identified the issue and is implementing a fix suggests it might be a technical issue.
This is the second time since December 2024 that ChatGPT has experienced service outages. Last month, both the company’s video generation model, Sora, and the Chatbot suffered several hours of service interruptions.
Nevertheless, this is a developing story, and we will continue to provide updates as they become available.
