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• On 10th June 2025, ChatGPT suffered a global outage affecting millions, including students, developers, and businesses, due to unspecified technical issues across its services.
• The incident spurred a spike in alternative AI chatbot usage and highlighted the growing reliance on and need for resilient AI infrastructure.

On June 10th, 2025, something unexpected happenedâ€�, the AI everyone’s been talking about, went down. It wasn’t just a hiccup; it was a full-blown outage that left users around the world scratching their heads. From the UK to the US and even India, people who relied on ChatGPT for everything from Ì첩ÈüʹÙÍøwork help to work projects were suddenly out of luck. The trouble started bright and early at 7:45 am BST and dragged on for over 12 hours, finally letting up by the end of the day. OpenAI, the brains behind ChatGPT, quickly jumped into action, admitting there was a problem and working to fix it. They managed to get things back on track, but they haven’t spilt the beans on exactly what went wrong. Rumours are flying—maybe it was too many people trying to use it at once, or perhaps a software glitch—but nothing’s confirmed yet.

What Exactly Happened?

So, what exactly went down on that fateful day? Well, at around 7:45 am BST, ChatGPT just stopped working. Poof! Gone. Users everywhere—from students cramming for exams to professionals draughting emails—were suddenly met with error messages instead of the usual helpful responses. Downdetector, that website where you report when services go kaput, saw over 2,000 complaints at its peak, which shows how many people were affected. By the time evening rolled around, OpenAI had managed to patch things up, and the number of errors dropped way down, but it was a long day for sure.

Who Felt the Pinch?

Now, who felt the pinch of this outage? Pretty much everyone who uses ChatGPT, which is a lot of people. In the UK, A-level students were probably the most upset because, let’s face it, exams are stressful enough without your study buddy going AWOL. Across the globe, whether you were trying to get work done or just asking random questions, ChatGPT was MIA. In India, out of about 800 complaints, a whopping 88% said the chatbot wasn’t responding at all, according to NDTV Profit. And it wasn’t just ChatGPT that was down; OpenAI’s other tools, like Sora and their APIs, were also acting up, which meant developers and businesses that rely on those were also in a bind.

How Did OpenAI Handle It?

To their credit, OpenAI didn’t leave everyone hanging. They were quick to admit there was a problem right on their status page, and they even marked it as critical, which is like saying, “Yeah, this is bad.” They kept users in the loop through X, where their rep, Srinivas Narayanan, assured everyone they were on it. By midday, they had figured out what was going on and started fixing things. They rolled out some fixes, and by the end of the day, most services were back up and running, though I’m sure there were still a few hiccups here and there, as noted by TechRadar.

Why Did It Happen?

Now, the million-dollar question: why did it happen? Well, no one’s saying for sure yet. It could be that the servers just couldn’t handle all the traffic—ChatGPT is super popular, after all. Maybe there was a software update that went wrong or perhaps even a security breach, though that’s just speculation. Remember, back in April, there was another outage when everyone was trying to get those Ghibli-style images, and that crashed the system too, as mentioned by NDTV Profit. So, it might be that as more people use ChatGPT, the infrastructure is struggling to keep up. But without an official word from OpenAI, we’re all just guessing.

Alternatives During the Outage

When ChatGPT went offline, users didn’t just sit around waiting. Many turned to other AI chatbots like Claude and DeepSeek. Tom’s Guide reported that DeepSeek saw a projected 2.13 million searches, while Claude got a spike with 291,181 searches on June 10th, compared to its usual 149,441. This shows how quickly people pivoted to alternatives when their go-to tool was down.

What’s the Takeaway?

So, what’s the takeaway from all this? Well, the ChatGPT outage on June 10th, 2025, was a big deal. It showed just how much we’ve come to depend on AI tools like ChatGPT for all sorts of tasks. When it went down, it threw a wrench in the works for a lot of people. OpenAI did a decent job of getting things back on track quickly, but it also highlighted that as AI becomes more integral to our lives, the systems need to be rock-solid. We don’t know exactly what caused the outage, but it’s a reminder that even the best tech can have its off days. Maybe this will push companies like OpenAI to beef up their systems, and perhaps it’ll make us all think about having backup plans when we rely so heavily on a single tool. After all, in a world where AI is everywhere, we can’t afford for it to go missing when we need it most.