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Update: As of June 12, 2025, ChatGPT has been experiencing increased error rates but maintains 99% uptime across its services. This concludes our coverage of this incident.
At 2:45 AM ET today, ChatGPT users worldwide encountered an eerie silence. What began as scattered errors snowballed into a 7-hour (and counting) global outage, leaving 500 million users stranded—from students facing deadlines to executives drafting emails. OpenAI’s status page confirmed “elevated error rates” across ChatGPT, its API, and the video generator Sora, igniting chaos for those who’ve woven AI into their daily lives.
Timeline of the Crash
- 2:36 AM ET: First outage reports hit OpenAI’s status page.
- 7:45 AM BST: U.K./European users awaken to “Request timed out” errors.
- Peak reports: 1,963+ incidents logged on Downdetector—a 4,900% surge from baseline.
- 9:43 AM ET: OpenAI identifies the “root cause” but struggles to deploy a fix.
- 11:00 AM ET: OpenAI reports elevated but declining error rates.
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