ChatGPT faces outage amid viral Ghibli art feature; services restored

ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, was down for several users on Sunday with its servers overwhelmed by a surge in demand for its new Studio Ghibli-style image generation feature.

However, the developer soon updated saying all impacted services have been "fully recovered".

Reports of the outage began surfacing Saturday evening, leaving several users unable to access the service for a considerable period, but escalated on Sunday around 4 pm, with users flocking to social media to express their frustration.

"We are sorry, an error occurred. Please retry after a few minutes.

"It seems this application has become very popular, and its available rate limit has been reached. Please retry after a few minutes," users saw this popup when trying to access the platform.

OpenAI acknowledged the server crash, and later updated that services have been restored. It showed that the ChatGPT web was the most affected.

"We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation," OpenAI acknowledged.

Downdetector, a website that monitors online service disruptions, showed a massive spike in reported problems with OpenAI, starting around 4.19 pm on Sunday, with 219 reports.

"All impacted services have now fully recovered. The detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) will be published in the next 5 business days," OpenAI said in an update.

The server overload of ChatGPT was significantly influenced by the release of a new feature that allowed users to generate images in the style of Studio Ghibli, a renowned Japanese animation studio.

This feature quickly gained immense popularity, prompting a surge in user activity as people flocked to experiment with the tool.

"can yall please chill on generating images this is insane our team needs sleep," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X.

The outage affected users globally, preventing them from accessing ChatGPT for various tasks, ranging from content creation to coding assistance.