Many users who attempted to log in to the ChatGPT website this morning were met with an error message: “Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed.”
At Downdetector, hundreds of users were similarly reporting problems, starting around 6:30 a.m. ET and then ramping up significantly throughout the morning. (Disclosure: Downdetector is owned by Ziff Davis, the same parent company as Mashable.)
And at 7:12 a.m. ET, OpenAI confirmed on a status page that it was investigating a problem with some of its websites. A later update on the OpenAI website reads, “We have confirmed that the incident is caused by an issue with one of our third-party service providers. We will provide updates as they become available.”
The issue is connected to the ongoing Cloudflare outage. ChatGPT is one of many affected services, which also include X, Canva, Spotify, and YouTube. When a major cloud computing platform like AWS or Cloudflare experiences a problem, it can cause ripple effects throughout the World Wide Web.
However, we do have some good news for ChatGPT users. The AI chatbot’s iOS app appears to be working like normal, as of this writing. It’s specifically the ChatGPT website that appears to be suffering problems.
It’s too soon to say what caused the Cloudflare outage. The latest update from Cloudflare states that the cloud services platform was “working on restoring service for application services customers.”
This is a developing story…
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
