ChatGPT went down globally yesterday. Not partially, not for a select group of users, completely down for everybody. Whether you were using the free plan, Plus, or Enterprise, it didn’t matter. The bots were offline, for the most part.
OpenAI didn’t say much beyond the usual “we’re investigating.” But the internet was already on fire.
“Too many requests,” “conversation not found,” or endless loading screens. That’s how users were locked out for close to 12 hours in some places. Even Sora, the text-to-video tool, and API services were affected.
And this wasn’t just a First World headache. Zimbabweans felt it too.
You’d be surprised how many everyday people use it
If you still think AI tools like ChatGPT are something only Silicon Valley tech bros use to automate their emails, you’ve been asleep.
Over the past year, we’ve seen local students, freelancers, devs, entrepreneurs, and yes, even gogo selling madora on WhatsApp, turning to ChatGPT for help. Though to be accurate, in Zimbabwe Meta AI is king, but still, you get the point.
When the ChatGPT outage hit, it was a disaster for many. Tasks were not completed, assignments went unfinished, and a few business pitches were likely delayed.
No one’s losing sleep over that, but it shows us that this tool has become part of the workflow, even here.
MarketWatch says ChatGPT’s weekly user base is about 400 million. That number explains why the service faced the outage in the first place.
It also explains why it was the second most searched topic in the U.S. on the day of the outage, and probably top 10 here, if we had that data.
The Conversation’s study “of more than 32,000 workers from 47 countries shows that 58% of employees intentionally use AI at work.”
Have your alternatives ready people
People scrambled. Google Gemini, Claude, Perplexity were all suddenly they were back in the rotation. But most users just sat, refreshed, and hoped ChatGPT would come back. It eventually did, later that night.
That’s the risk of relying too much on a single platform. Especially when it’s free or cheap and really good.
But we’re relying more and more on AI to function, which means we need to start treating it more like infrastructure, and less like a bonus feature. If it goes down, your day shouldn’t fall apart.
That’s why you should be like me. I have all AI options locked and loaded and ready to go. They can’t all go down at the same time. I will always have one at the ready.
Maybe we need backup tools. Maybe we need to write the occasional email ourselves. Or maybe we just need to accept that AI, helpful as it is, can still have bad days.
We just need to remember how to work without the bots, or one day, an outage might break more than just our browsers. It appears Chinese kids won’t have that problem. Here’s a comment shared by Techradar:
Unlike ChatGPT, some Chinese AI chatbots went dark deliberately during exams
The ChatGPT outage was keenly felt by British students eager to use the AI chatbot during their A-level exams today, but students in China have already been deliberately cut off by multiple AI platforms.
As more than 13 million students sat down for the four-day gaokao university entrance exam, ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek stopped answering any questions at all.
Meanwhile, Tencent’s Yuanbao, Alibaba’s Qwen, and Moonshot’s Kimi AI chatbots all disabled their image-recognition abilities during the hours of the exam.
There was no public announcement from any of the companies, but students shared screenshots and word-of-mouth reports on blank pages where their AI assistants usually wait. At least British students can turn to Claude or other alternatives.
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