ChatGPT is now back online following a major outage

ChatGPT has just recovered from a major global outage, with the chatbot now back online and ready to roll.

Earlier today, plenty of people complained that they couldn't use ChatGPT, across various social media sites and elsewhere. Report numbers peaked at over 1,000 on Downdetector, a useful site for checking when services are experiencing issues.

The problem began at 3:45am CDT, and now appears largely resolved at the time of writing (just after 7am CDT), going by Downdetector.

Moreover, OpenAI, the maker of the chatbot, admitted the issue on its status page, before noting that a fix has been deployed, and the incident has now been fully resolved.

Obviously that's good news for those who want to use OpenAI's chatbot, which has become very popular in recent times.

OpenAI didn't give a firm reason for the outage, merely describing an 'issue' of some sort, and not telling us how widespread the gremlins in the works were, either. But judging from reports, people in the US, UK, and elsewhere across the globe were affected.

Maybe later today we'll learn more about precisely what the glitch in question was, and why it turned into such a large-scale outage.

ChatGPT has been adopted by a number of firms, most notably Microsoft which based its Bing AI chatbot on the technology (recently clarifying that it uses ChatGPT 4, the latest and most powerful version).

Indeed, if you want to try out the Bing AI, we also recently saw that people no longer have to queue in a waitlist for the chatbot, and can now get straight in to test the powers of the AI (there's a trick to doing this, mind you).

Those powers for the improved ChatGPT 4 include the ability to turn a simple sketch of a website design on a scrap of paper into a fully working site, which is pretty cool to say the least.