OpenAI’s popular Artificial Intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, experienced a major outage early Thursday.

Users who tried to access the platform were greeted with an error message: “ChatGPT is currently unavailable. Status: Identified – We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix.”

The outage, which lasted over three hours, led to widespread frustration, particularly among students and professionals who rely on ChatGPT for various tasks.

On X (formerly Twitter), the issue became a trending topic, garnering over 27,000 posts as of early Thursday.

Downdetector, a platform that tracks outages, similarly revealed that OpenAI received over 27,000 reports from around the world.

Many users took to social media to express their concerns, with some users voicing their distress over urgent deadlines.

chrsluvlanguage tweeted on X.com, “Why is ChatGPT down when I need to do my English homework?” while #jasmineeub wrote, “ChatGPT down and I have a final tomorrow.”

scottieshowtime also wrote on X, “ChatGPT decides to crash the day before I have a project to complete.”

Acknowledging the outage in a post on X, OpenAI wrote, “We’re experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix.

Responding to OpenAI’s post, Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot wrote, “Hi everyone, nice to meet you.”

The timing of the comment drew a wave of attention on X, with some suggesting that it could serve as an alternative for those seeking assistance during the downtime.

A few hours after the downtime, the services of the platform owned by Sam Altman were restored.

Altman confirmed this in a post on X, saying, “We back.”

Evinst3in replied, “Thanks, Sam! Now, I can resume my work.”

Star_Knight12 also wrote, “ChatGPT is back now. What could be the reason behind the outage?”

The outage follows a similar disruption earlier on Wednesday when Meta’s core platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, experienced major service interruptions.