A widespread outage affecting several prominent AI platforms, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity, has sparked concerns about the reliability and resilience of the AI industry’s infrastructure. The incident, which occurred on June 4, 2024, left millions of users worldwide without access to these critical AI services for several hours.
The most severely impacted service was OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which experienced a major outage lasting several hours, starting around 7:33 AM PT. The popular AI chatbot was unavailable to users on all plans, with OpenAI describing the incident as a “major outage.” While the service was restored around 10:17 AM PT, ChatGPT faced another disruption later in the day, which was resolved by 7:00 PM PT.
Anthropic’s Claude and Perplexity also faced technical difficulties during the outage, although these were resolved more quickly than the issues experienced by ChatGPT. Google’s Gemini, on the other hand, remained operational, but some users reported brief connectivity issues.
Experts suggest that the simultaneous outage could be indicative of a broader infrastructure issue or a problem at an internet-scale level, similar to outages affecting multiple social media platforms concurrently. Another theory points to the possibility that the disruptions faced by Claude and Perplexity might have been caused by an overwhelming surge in traffic following ChatGPT’s outage, causing these services to reach their capacity limits.
The incident has raised concerns about the reliability and robustness of current AI infrastructure to handle increasing loads, as well as the transparency of AI service providers in communicating issues and outages to users. The outage comes on the heels of an open letter published by several anonymous former employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind, warning of “reckless” behavior in the AI space and citing concerns about the lack of effective oversight and the potential for misuse or unintended consequences of AI technologies.
As the AI industry continues to evolve and play a more integral role in our daily lives, the need for robust and resilient infrastructure, as well as effective communication and transparency, has never been more crucial.