ChatGPT Experiences Major Outage Disrupting Service Worldwide

What Happened?

ChatGPT was experiencing a major service outage which had lasted at least five hours as of the afternoon of June 10^th, disrupting services to users worldwide. According to Tech Radar and Tom’s Guide, the outage began at approximately 2.45am eastern standard time before falling slightly and spiking again as users in the U.K. and Europe came online. The second spike has only grown as ChatGPT users in Europe, North America and Australia continue to report problems.

Open AI, which owns ChatGPT, had not offered any explanation for the outage by afternoon on June 10^th.

Why it Matters

ChatGPT has over four hundred million weekly users and hopes to raise that number to one billion per week by the end of 2025. As a large language model, ChatGPT was trained on an enormous amount of text available online, and it works by answering questions posed to it by users. There is a free and tiered subscription version of ChatGPT available online. To date, this is the largest and longest outage ChatGPT has experienced.

The way people use the internet is changing thanks to AI and large language models like ChatGPT. Since the early 2000s, the internet has provided users with access to the link economy. In a link economy, users type in a question to Google or another similar search engine and receive a list of links which the search engine algorithm thinks are most relevant to the query. 

Thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence programs, the link economy is being replaced by the answer economy. AI programs like ChatGPT provide users with a direct answer to specific questions, and that has profound implications for e-commerce. Traditional publishers and advertisers have seen the number of clicks on their links drop by as much as fifty percent in the past year. And the reason is more people are using tools like ChatGPT to get answers instead of a list of links. 

Because the AI programs have gotten better at delivering accurate answers to questions posed by users, more users have been flocking to AI programs when they want to find something online instead of going to older search engines like Google. That’s good news in terms of revenue for AI programs, but bad news for publishers or advertisers still relying on the link model.

Whether or not the current outage will shake users’ confidence in ChatGPT is a question that only time can answer, but disruptions to other similar programs are not unheard of. 

How it Affects You

Lawyers, students, travelers, and millions of other people use ChatGPT every day to conduct business, write papers, plan trips, and handle queries which arise in the course of everyday life. As AI programs become more integral to the lives of users, it's likely they will respond to disruptions the way they already respond to power outages, as temporary inconveniences which just have to be weathered before life returns to normal.

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