3rd September, Wednesday: On September 3, 2025, users worldwide were unable to access ChatGPT, with Downdetector recording hundreds of reports of incidents in a mere twenty minutes. Several individuals vented their frustrations on social media as both the web platform and mobile application seemed to be impacted. Some users had normal access, but others saw continuous network errors. To date, OpenAI has made no official announcement about the outage.
This isn't the first time that the AI giant has run into trouble. In the early part of this year, on January 23, 2025, a widespread service outage hampered ChatGPT access in nations such as Spain, Argentina, and the U.S. That outage lasted for more than three hours. A similar glitch hit on December 26, 2024, and another outage on February 5, 2025, received over 22,000 reports from users.
Additionally, over the past few days, ChatGPT has had temporary outages: about 10 minutes of downtime on September 3 itself, and on September 1 and 2.
During the outage, users looking for alternatives may use several other AI chat platforms:
- Google Gemini- specialized in effective text generation.
- Microsoft Copilot- provides AI chat with added image-generation capabilities.
- YouChat- incorporates web search to get current answers.
- Jasper Chat- designed for writers and SEO-driven writing.
- Perplexity AI- supports research work with precise citations.
- Anthropic’s Claude – known for longer conversations with fewer cut-offs.
- Meta’s Llama 3 models – powers multiple chat apps with open-source flexibility.
These substitutes stand in to cover the gap whenever ChatGPT is down, presenting multifaceted capabilities to suit various user requirements.
