ChatGPT is down: Numerous users worldwide are currently experiencing difficulties accessing ChatGPT, a popular AI tool, as reported by OpenAI on its official website. Users have taken to social media platforms to express frustration, citing issues such as the website not loading or encountering “internal server errors.” The outage appears to impact both the web and mobile versions, although some users can still access the AI tool on Android and iPhone devices.

OpenAI has acknowledged the problem and is actively investigating the outage, as stated on their website. This incident follows a similar occurrence in November of the previous year when ChatGPT faced disruptions due to a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. OpenAI then confirmed the abnormal traffic pattern associated with the attack and assured users that they were working to mitigate the situation.

Interestingly, this current outage coincides with the recent launch of the GPT Store by OpenAI. Described as a PlayStore for custom chatbots, the GPT Store allows users to create personalized versions of ChatGPT without the need for coding. Users can share these customized versions with others. OpenAI introduced the GPT Store after witnessing the creation of over 3 million custom versions of ChatGPT by users in the two months since the initial GPT announcement.

Simultaneously with the GPT Store launch, OpenAI unveiled a new subscription tier known as the ChatGPT Team subscription. Priced at $25 to $30 monthly per user, depending on the billing cycle, this subscription is tailored for smaller teams seeking a secure and collaborative workspace. It features access to GPT-4, boasting a larger 32,000-token context window to accommodate more complex queries. Additionally, subscribers benefit from increased message caps, with OpenAI emphasizing that user data and conversations will not be used to train its models.