After experiencing an outage that lasted for several hours in the early morning, OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot was down again, but this time it wasn't the only AI provider affected: Anthropic's Claude and Perplexity both began experiencing issues on Tuesday morning as well, though these were resolved more quickly.
Google's Gemini appears to still be operational, although some users have reported that it may have gone offline temporarily.
It's unusual for all three major AI providers to be down at the same time and could indicate a broader infrastructure or internet-wide issue, such as affecting multiple social media sites at the same time. It's also possible that Claude and Perplexity's issues weren't due to a bug or other issue, but rather to the ChatGPT outage causing them to receive a large amount of traffic in a short period of time.
On ChatGPT's landing page, the ability to send messages to the AI chatbot was not working during the outage, which began at approximately 7:33 AM PST and was resolved at approximately 10:17 AM PST. This was another outage that lasted several hours.
Image credit: OpenAI/ChatGPT Landing page down
At one point during the outage, ChatGPT's website updated to indicate that the service was full (pirate lingo) and offered to notify users once it was back online.
Image credit: OpenAI/CapacityMessage
Claude's website displayed an error message that read: “An error occurred while rendering a server component. To prevent the disclosure of sensitive information, certain messages have been omitted from production builds. This error instance includes a digest property that may provide additional details about the nature of the error.”
The site then advises you to “try again.”
Claude was back at work just after 12:10pm ET.
Image credit: Anthropic/Claude down
Perplexity's site also displayed the capacity overload messages that appear when the service receives a large number of requests. The messages said things like “We'll be back soon” and “We're currently receiving many questions and have reached capacity. Please come back soon.”
The site started working again around the time the Claude outage was resolved, but has been intermittently up and down since then.
Image credit: Perplexity / outage
It's worth noting that ChatGPT only recently resolved a lengthy outage that affected its service overnight. The chatbot went down for users worldwide in the early hours of the morning (Pacific Standard Time), sparking complaints across X and Threads. The company's status page indicated that the bug was being fixed and that the issue was being monitored at around 12:21am Pacific Standard Time.
As of 7:33 a.m. PST, the status page has been updated to show that ChatGPT is again unavailable to some users and that OpenAI is “currently investigating this issue.” As of 12:28 p.m. ET, the chatbot was still down, according to the status page, which warned of a “major outage.” The issue was fixed a few hours later.
Image credit: OpenAI status page
Three very different AI services, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, are all down right now.
What on earth is going on? pic.twitter.com/dUkVhSehGG
— Benjamin De Kreker 🏴☠️ (@BenjaminDEKR) June 4, 2024
The AI provider did not immediately respond to a request for comment or more information about the outage, but will update as more information becomes available.
AI outages aren't the only online outages currently occurring: Forbes magazine has reported that TikTok is experiencing a zero-day spam attack that is currently affecting the accounts of some celebrities and brands, including Paris Hilton and CNN.
This post was published on June 4th, 2024 at 12:20pm EST and has since been updated as Claude and Perplexity have come back online, followed by ChatGPT.