There's a massive ChatGPT outage, maybe it's time to switch over to Gemini

[Update 6/10 2:45 pm]: ChatGPT seems to be slowly coming back online for most people after a 12-hour outage, as DownDetector reports have started to dwindle. However, OpenAI's status page says, "We are still monitoring the fix and we are working towards full recovery."

What you need to know

• ChatGPT is experiencing a massive global outage with users being unable to use the AI chatbot.
• The outage seems to have started at 2 am ET and is still ongoing, people have spotted error messages pop up when they try to type out a query.
• OpenAI has confirmed the outage and are currently working on a fix.
• Several ChatGPT users are looking at AI alternatives like Google's Gemini, Grok, Perplexity AI.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is currently experiencing a massive outage that began early this morning. According to DownDetector, several reports of the outage began trickling in at around 2:20 am ET, with the spike in outage reports at around 5:30 am ET in the U.S.

The outage on the AI chatbot has continued to peak over the past several hours as people across Europe, North America, and Australia face difficulties accessing ChatGPT.

The outage is impacting both free as well as tiers of the AI chatbot, with users seeing error messages when trying to use the service or ChatGPT failing to load altogether.

OpenAI took to X to confirm the outage and stated that they've identified the root cause and are working as fast as possible to fix the issue. Users can also get the latest updates on the outage from OpenAI's status page, which indicates that "We are continuing to work on implementing the mitigation, and we are now seeing recovery on API. Full recovery across all listed services may take another few hours. We will continue to provide updates as progress is made."

That said, every time there's a massive, unexpected outage on one platform, people tend to look for other alternatives. Several people who use ChatGPT took to X to state that they're using AI alternatives like Google's Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity AI that seem to be up and running as usual.

Google's Gemini stands as a top alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT, as it can perform similar tasks to the latter. Gemini can give users real-time information about their queries as it directly pulls answers from Google Search. The LLM can summarize lengthy texts, generate ideas for any project, and also bring a whole host of multimodal capabilities with Gemini Live that allow users to engage with Gemini conversationally on the go, utilizing voice and visual input to receive customized responses.

The latest Gemini 2.5 Pro and Flash can even tackle complex problems, analyze data for insights and visualizations, and engage in multi-step planning. Gemini's integration into Google's products like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets also enhances overall productivity.