Introduction
On June 10, 2025, millions of ChatGPT users worldwide encountered unexpected disruptions. Reports flooded social media and outage-tracking platforms like DownDetector, with users experiencing error messages such as “A network error occurred,” and “Hmm… something seems to have gone wrong.” Today, we provide a comprehensive overview of the outage—what triggered it, how OpenAI responded, and how users are coping.
1. When and How the Outage Began
The outage began in the early hours of June 10—around 3 AM ET (or roughly 12:30 PM IST in India)—when both web and app users noticed problems accessing ChatGPT and related services. According to OpenAI’s status page, reports of “elevated error rates and latency” began around that time . Downdetector captured a surge in outage reports: over 1,400 complaints in the United Kingdom and more than 1,000 in the U.S. at its peak . In India alone, Flooding began around 12:30 PM IST, with 800+ complaints by 3 PM .
2. Scope of the Disruption
This wasn’t a minor hiccup: multiple core services were affected.
- ChatGPT chatbot: Many users were unable to load prompts or get responses.
- OpenAI API: Slow performance and errors affected developers.
- Sora (text-to-video AI generator): Also reported degraded performance .
Some users experienced a partial outage, meaning system access was possible in some regions or accounts, but global consistency was absent.
3. Error Messages in the Wild
Users reported a range of error notifications and failures:
- “A network error occurred. Please check your connection and try again. If this issue persists please contact us…”
- “Hmm… something seems to have gone wrong.”
- “Error in message stream.” (reported by Decrypt).
U.S. media such as NBC New York noted the issue lasted roughly five hours by late morning, with elevated error rates and latency across services.
4. OpenAI’s Official Response
OpenAI responded swiftly via its status page:
- First notice: “Some users are experiencing elevated error rates and latency across the listed services. We are continuing to investigate.”
- Follow-up updates detailed the ongoing investigation and confirmed performance degradation in ChatGPT, API, and Sora.
- No root cause was immediately disclosed, and no exact resolution timeline was provided.
As of mid-day June 10, systems remained degraded—the company was actively working to resolve anomalies.
5. Users React on Social Media
Social media (especially X, formerly known as Twitter) was rife with reactions:
- Users shared their experiences: “ChatGPT appears to be down right now—getting error messages and slow load times.”
- Memes flooded timelines, with comical takes like “Am I supposed to use my brain now at work?” and “How am I supposed to do things?” .
Despite the humor, the outage disrupted students, professionals, developers, and businesses alike—highlighting the deep integration of AI tools into everyday workflows .
6. Regional Incident Breakdown
- United States: Over 1,000 complaints; peak issues reported around late morning ET.
- United Kingdom: Around 1,400 outage reports—one of the hardest-hit regions.
- India: Reports surged shortly after 12:30 PM IST, escalating to 800+ by 3 PM. Indian users reported 88% of issues tied to ChatGPT, 9% app-related, and 3% API glitches.
7. Potential Root Causes
OpenAI hasn’t confirmed what caused the issue, but several theories have surfaced:
- Internal failure: Misfired updates or backend errors often cause such problems.
- Increased traffic: Sudden overload—though DownDetector reports show a spectrum of latency issues, not just 100% downtime.
- Cyber activity: While a DDoS attack is one possibility, there is no current evidence to support such a scenario .
It’s important to note that prior outages (like earlier in April 2025, post-GPT‑4o rollout or 2023’s suspected DDoS) were eventually attributed to internal changes not external attacks .
8. History of Similar Disruptions
This is not the first global hiccup for ChatGPT:
- April 2025: Surge in user activity after GPT‑4o—led to significant slowdowns.
- December 2024: Apple Intelligence integration slowed services.
- November 2023: A suspected DDoS incident, allegedly involving Russian hackers.
Despite a strong overall uptime (ChatGPT typically has 99.4% availability), days like today are a reminder of the inherent fragility of complex AI systems.
9. Alternatives During the Outage
Faced with temporary unavailability, users turned to alternative AI platforms:
- Gemini (Google), Microsoft Copilot, Grok, and others provided interim relief.
- OpenAI’s dedicated Playground remained functional for many users during the outage.
These alternatives helped professionals and students continue with their tasks while waiting for ChatGPT to recover.
10. What Comes Next?
OpenAI must restore full service and explain the outage to avoid future disruptions:
- Transparent updates: Users expect clarity on cause, recovery, and future prevention.
- Infrastructure resiliency: Redundancies and fail-safes against large-scale hiccups are more crucial than ever.
- Reliance concerns: This incident will prompt many to reassess reliance on a single AI provider and diversify their tools.
Conclusion & Key Takeaways
- 📉 Timeline: The outage began around 3 AM ET / 12:30 PM IST on June 10 and persisted through the afternoon.
- 📊 Scale: Over a thousand reports in multiple regions, impacting ChatGPT, Sora, and even the API.
- ⚠️ User impact: Teachers, students, professionals, developers all reported disrupted workflows.
- 💬 Official stance: OpenAI acknowledged elevated errors and is investigating via its status page.
- 😂 Internet reactions: Memes and jokes (#ChatGPTdown) dominated social feeds.
- 🔄 Next steps: Expect explanations, improved infrastructure, and backup strategies from both OpenAI and its user base.
This outage underscores how critical AI-driven tools like ChatGPT have become. With significant trust placed in their reliability, every minute offline matters. We will continue to monitor OpenAI’s status updates and report when full restoration is confirmed.
