Imagine ‘OpenAI chief Sam Altman working for four hours without ChatGPT during its downtime last week. “I’d kind of forgotten how to function without it,” he confessed in a recent interview. “It really hit me—we are going to be relying on these systems more and more.”
Altman added that this creates a cascading effect on everything else because at the times we most need these tools to solve problems, they aren’t available. “Everything was just broken.”
The ripple effects of ChatGPT’s recent downtime were felt worldwide. According to Altman, the chatbot has reached over 300 million active users weekly, and plans are afoot to grow this figure nearly fourfold over the next year, with a one-billion-user target. Talking statistics, OpenAI claims that over a billion user messages are sent on ChatGPT every day, and 1.3 million developers have built on OpenAI in the US.
In just a short span since its launch, ChatGPT has become an integral part of the daily operations for businesses and individuals alike. Its widespread adoption has made it as essential as the internet or Wi-Fi for many users.
Professionals in various fields use ChatGPT to create content and improve their workflows, while students turn to it for help with learning and completing assignments. Its influence can be felt in many areas of daily life.
On the enterprise side, major companies such as Microsoft, Shutterstock, BuzzFeed, Salesforce, Atlassian, Bain & Company, Neo, Consensus, Snap, Quizlet, Instacart, Shopify, Coca-Cola, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Khan Academy are among the key users of OpenAI’s services.
No ChatGPT, No Work?
At many workplaces, ChatGPT has become a cornerstone of productivity. It can generate reports, suggest ideas for projects, or even help in coding by providing solutions or debugging assistance.
“As a developer, I rely on it to debug, brainstorm, and speed up development work. Besides, as a content creator, it helps refine ideas and draft scripts quickly,” said Ashutosh Shrivastava, AI evangelist, who has been using ChatGPT since 2023.
“When unavailable, it’s like losing an assistant who was working with you on different tasks, and you realise how much you’ve come to depend on it,” he said.
Many companies rely on ChatGPT for customer service, content generation, and workflow automation. During the outage, these businesses faced delays, potential revenue loss, and reduced productivity. For instance, Engage AI, a startup offering AI-powered LinkedIn sales tools, reported that almost all its customers lost access to their services during the downtime.
“OpenAI API and ChatGPT are down. Do we just… write things now?” joked a user on X.
“ChatGPT servers are down; this is a first. It’s never great for an overused platform like OpenAI to experience such issues. This leaves customers with a subconscious lack of trust,” said Demetrius P, founder of Candestra Capital.
João Marinotti, a law professor at IU Maurer School of Law, pointed out that this concentration creates another single point of failure. He explained that the ChatGPT outage demonstrated how disruptive it could be when generative AI APIs are embedded in services like customer support and email sorting.
“All devs of ChatGPT wrappers working now to add ‘ChatGPT API is down’ error messages in their apps,” quipped another user on X.
However, for consumers, there’s no dearth of choices thanks to alternatives like Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, and Perplexity being readily available.
“I just use Claude for personal work as I find it better [than the rest]. But yes, businesses that rely on ChatGPT have to be cautious and recognise that they should diversify their LLM strategy and not have a single point of failure,” Deedy Das, VC at Menlo Ventures, told AIM.
“ChatGPT’s outage is another reason to pay for multiple models. If one goes down, you have options,” said a user on X.
Echoing similar sentiments, Puneet Jindal, CEO at Labellerr, said, “Enterprises need to have a backup plan in place and not be dependent on one tech giant’s offerings. It’s necessary to build an intelligence layer to manage the best of what is available.”
He further shared that they have built their intelligence layer for data labelling.
Why was ChatGPT Down?
In the post-mortem report following the outage, OpenAI explained that the incident was caused by the deployment of a new telemetry service aimed at improving the monitoring of their Kubernetes clusters—systems that manage the servers powering their services.
However, the service unintentionally overwhelmed the Kubernetes control plane, a core component responsible for managing these clusters.
“Technology failures and service outages are not new. History has shown that no system is immune to downtime, and this will continue to be a reality in the future. All businesses, large or small, need to have contingency plans (Plan B) in place to mitigate the effects of service disruptions when they occur,” Shivani Gupta, chief data scientist at Jio, told AIM.
She explained that for businesses using commercial AI services, such as those offered under service-level agreements, the risk of extended downtime is much lower. “Commercial providers typically offer better reliability, performance guarantees, and penalties for failures, ensuring that critical operations are not interrupted,” she said.
Interestingly, OpenAI is dependent on several other service providers to keep ChatGPT running. According to a recent report, OpenAI is using services from Cloudflare, Okta, Fivetran and others.
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