The technical glitch that took ChatGPT out of action

ChatGPT issues worldwide began Wednesday morning when some API models showed “elevated error rates”

The outage left users struggling to access the chatbot as the platform was hit by a massive internal outage

Notably, the GenAI giant currently has over 200 million users globally, with India accounting for over 9%, making the country its second-largest market

In the early hours of Wednesday (September 18), OpenAI’s conversational AI chatbot ChatGPT experienced a ‘partial outage’ that affected users across the world.

According to the company, the issue started around 3:50 pm PDT (4:20 am IST) when some API models started showing “increased error rates”. However, the partial outage only reached Indian shores hours later in the morning when users started reporting issues while accessing the chatbot.

The company now claims that the problem has been resolved.

According to DownDetector, it received as many as 24 reports of the outage from India starting around 9:30 AM. By noon, the number of reports had risen to 54, before dropping and rising to around 48 reports by 5:30 PM. According to the website, users in all major cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Chandigarh, Ahmedabad, Indore and others reported having issues accessing ChatGPT.

However, this is not the first time the company has faced a technical glitch. On September 16, all API requests on the platform were blocked and users experienced problems creating new accounts and logging in.

Additionally, ChatGPT’s web interface experienced issues with a specific version of Google Chrome, as noted on OpenAI’s status page.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT Enterprise users are experiencing issues with the Workspace Analytics tab not returning any data.

Notably, the GenAI giant currently has over 200 million users globally, with India accounting for over 9% of that number. This makes India the company’s second-largest market. To bolster its presence in India, OpenAI in April hired Pragyya Misra, a former Meta and Truecaller employee, to lead public policy and partnerships in the country.

The development comes at a time when India’s GenAI ecosystem has attracted significant investor interest. India is now home to over 100 generative AI startups, which collectively over $600 million raised since 2019. Ola’s Krutrim also became the country’s first AI unicorn earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the Indian government has also taken a proactive approach by approving the IndiaAI mission with a budget allocation of INR 10,372 Cr in the next five years.

This funding is intended to foster innovation in the domestic AI ecosystem and achieve the mission objectives through a public-private partnership (PPP) model.

According to a report by Inc42, the Indian generative AI market is expected to grow rapidly and is expected to grow from $1.1 billion in 2023 to more than $17 billion in 2030with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 48%.