Reports that ChatGPT would not open or produced errors during use surged at one point on September 3.
The meaning of the error seen on screen also differs depending on whether it was a problem limited to ChatGPT or an incident affecting multiple services at the same time.
Distinguishing the reports and recovery-related announcements included in coverage at the time shows what can be said with certainty.
3-line summary
1. Reports of a ChatGPT outage surged on September 3
2. Of more than 1만2천 reports, 85% were related to ChatGPT
3. An announcement that a fix had been applied is different from a complete recovery
Reports That Began Around 10:30 a.m. and 1만2천 Reports
This search term was observed in the U.S. search market. However, this only refers to the market where the search was observed; it does not mean that the outage occurred in the United States or that the reporting outlets were based there. The coverage provided did not identify a specific actual location where the incident occurred.
Asbury Park Press reported that on Thursday, September 3, reports of problems using OpenAI services had totaled more than 1만2천 shortly before 11 a.m. This count was based on user reports submitted to Downdetector. The same article reported that about 85% of complaints related to OpenAI involved ChatGPT.
The problem was reportedly first noticed suddenly at around 10:30 a.m. that day. The article at the time did not provide an estimated resolution time. Therefore, although it is possible to identify when reports were concentrated, it has not been confirmed when all users began and stopped experiencing the same problem.
Downdetector figures mean that abnormal conditions encountered by users on the service screen were reported all at once. Conversely, those figures alone cannot establish the cause of the error, the scope of the functions that stopped working, or whether the service was unavailable to all regions and accounts. The experience of not receiving a response from ChatGPT and the scope of an outage affecting the entire service are not the same thing.
Error messages such as “Unexpected status 404” and “Not unknown error,” mentioned in the article’s headline and body, are also clues to the inconvenience users experienced at the time. However, the provided content does not explain which functions displayed these messages or how widely they appeared. That is why it is difficult to determine the cause of the outage from a single error screen.
Reports of a Simultaneous Outage Also Affecting Claude and Grok
9to5Google reported that, in addition to ChatGPT, outages had also been confirmed for Claude (Anthropic’s artificial intelligence service) and Grok (X’s artificial intelligence service). According to the article, outages were displayed on the status pages of all 3 services, and Downdetector reports also surged around the same time.
This was the background that made it difficult to view the access error experienced by ChatGPT users simply as a problem with an individual account or device. It is confirmed that similar problems were reported across multiple services around similar times. However, the article provides no basis for concluding that all 3 services stopped working for the exact same reason.
Gemini (Google’s artificial intelligence service) was mentioned as a contrasting case. 9to5Google reported that although there was a trend of increasing user reports, Google did not display an indication confirming an outage in this incident. The increase in reports and confirmation of an outage by the operator are different pieces of information.
The article also said that outage reports had increased for Microsoft Azure (Microsoft Azure, a cloud service). It added that ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok use Azure’s cloud services. However, the possibility that Azure could have been the cause of this incident was presented only as a possibility in the article. Presenting it as a confirmed cause of the outage would go beyond the scope of the coverage.
Differences in the Recovery Stages That Remained After the “Fix Was Applied”
According to an update from 9to5Google, OpenAI said that it had applied a fix and that the service was recovering. User reports were also said to be declining at the same time. The decline in outage reports and the announcement that a fix had been applied were signals different from a situation in which the problem continued to worsen.
That does not mean the announcement should be interpreted as saying that all functions immediately returned to normal. The article’s wording was “recovering,” and the provided content did not state a completion time or that all ChatGPT usage environments were operating normally. Based on the coverage from September 3, it is also not possible to extend the account to describe the service’s condition afterward.
The same article reported that Claude had said some services had not yet recovered, while Grok continued to display an outage status. In other words, even among the 3 services mentioned together, the stages of recovery did not match. The expression simultaneous outage does not necessarily mean simultaneous normalization.
The clear facts in this coverage are that ChatGPT-related reports surged on September 3 and that OpenAI announced that a fix had been applied and recovery was underway. By contrast, the confirmed cause of the outage, its scope of impact on all users, and the time of complete recovery cannot be established from the information provided alone. The large number of reports at the time shows the scale of the inconvenience, but that number alone does not replace the full picture of the outage.
References
Tags #ChatGPT #ChatGPT #ChatGPTOutage #ChatGPTDown #AccessError #OpenAI #AIServiceOutage #Downdetector #Claude #Claude #Grok #Grok #Gemini #MicrosoftAzure #Azure