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OpenAI’s ChatGPT users report major issues, chatbot goes down 4+ hours

In this post:

  • OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Sora AI, and APIs face a partial outage globally, with users reporting elevated error rates and sluggish performance.
  • The disruptions follow the rollout of ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode and real-time translation features based on the GPT-4o model.
  • OpenAI acknowledges voice translation issues, including pitch inconsistencies and rare hallucinations, amid rising complaints from users in the UK and the US.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform is experiencing service disruptions that began in the early hours of Tuesday, affecting users across multiple continents. The outage has impacted access to ChatGPT, the Sora text-to-video AI tool, and associated APIs. 

Reports of problems began surfacing on Downdetector around 7 AM UTC, although OpenAI did not acknowledge the issues publicly until 9 AM, via its status webpage. At that time, the company confirmed “elevated error rates and latency” in several services, stating that it is “continuing to investigate” the matter.

By 11 AM, OpenAI issued an update stating that elevated error rates were mostly related to 14 APIs, 4 incidents in Sora, and 21 components of ChatGPT. The company labeled the service disruption as a “partial outage.” 

ChatGPT still responsive for some users

Affected users attempting to interact with ChatGPT were greeted with the error message: “Hmm…something seems to have gone wrong,” as shared by numerous social media users.

Although some subscribers reported sluggish performance and significant delays in generating chatbot responses, others said the service was operating normally for them. 

According to outage tracking metrics, over 1,000 complaints were registered in the United Kingdom alone, with nearly 500 reported in the United States within hours of the initial reports. 

Roughly 90% of those reports involved issues with the web version of ChatGPT, while the mobile app and API services accounted for less than 10% of complaints. Some users also reported problems with login functions and API connectivity.

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In 2025, there have been three major incidents of ChatGPT’s outage. Earlier in January, a partial outage affected ChatGPT’s ability to generate image content via DALL·E and slowed down GPT-4 responses, but it was resolved within hours.

Another major incident occurred in late April when both the ChatGPT web app and API services went offline intermittently over a two-day period. At the time, OpenAI cited issues with its cloud provider, but did not give any further public explanation beyond confirming a service degradation on its status page.

Performance issues after AVM and translation feature rollout

The outage comes at a time when OpenAI is rolling out upgrades to its Advanced Voice Mode (AVM) feature in ChatGPT for paid subscribers. 

In its recent statement, the AI firm claimed that the new features have more natural, human-like interactions through voice and offer real-time speech translation between multiple languages without interruption.

The enhancements are embedded on OpenAI’s GPT-4o model, a natively multimodal system capable of both understanding and generating audio. 

According to the company’s June 7, 2025, release notes, users can now simply instruct ChatGPT’s voice interface to translate between languages, and it will continue doing so in real time until directed otherwise.

OpenAI first demonstrated live speech translation in May 2024 and followed it with voice interaction technology released in September of the same year. 

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The new “Realtime API,” which allows developers to integrate speech-to-speech functionality into their apps, debuted in October 2024, and additional voice options were added in April 2025.

“This changes everything if you’re traveling abroad. ChatGPT can now stay in translation mode no reset needed, just talk. The new voice sounds way more human. More emotion, better pacing. It’s getting scary good,” reckoned one user on social platform X.

Still, per reports from the early testing of the feature, there are some quality issues. The company admitted that users may encounter occasional inconsistencies in audio output, such as tone and pitch irregularities, depending on the voice selected.

We expect to improve audio consistency over time,” OpenAI stated in its release notes. It also explained that the issues are noticeable with certain voice options and may affect the user experience in live translations or phones using accessibility support.

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