Just days after the launch of its new search engine feature, ChatGPT experienced a service outage on Monday morning, leaving many users frustrated. The outage was primarily characterized by frequent error messages, especially severe when users attempted to use the new search functionality.
According to user feedback, ChatGPT's website often displayed "404 Not Found" error messages, preventing smooth searches. This issue has garnered widespread attention, with a surge in outage reports on the DownDetector website, showing a rapid increase in user complaints.
Despite the surge in issues shown on DownDetector, OpenAI's status page did not update promptly, failing to provide an explanation for the outage. Soon, as the issues were gradually resolved, service was restored, and the number of outage reports on DownDetector returned to average levels.
The new search feature of ChatGPT, launched last week, allows users to search the web directly through an AI chatbot. Previously, ChatGPT had the ability to search for the latest information, but the addition of the new feature enables users to perform online searches with just a click of an icon, without needing to manually prompt the AI. This feature also offers richer search results than before, such as marking restaurants on maps or displaying photos of shopping items.
However, this search feature is currently only available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers who pay $20 per month. Although the launch of this service was highly anticipated, the brief outage undoubtedly affected user experience.
This is not the first time ChatGPT has faced service interruptions. According to OpenAI's status page, the most recent significant outage occurred on October 17, lasting only 12 minutes. Before that, a partial outage on September 20 lasted for several hours. Nevertheless, OpenAI claims that ChatGPT has achieved 99.84% uptime in the past 90 days.
Key Points:
🌐 **ChatGPT's new search engine feature experienced an outage shortly after launch, with users frequently encountering error messages.**
📉 **DownDetector website shows a surge in user complaints, drawing widespread attention to the outage situation.**
🔄 **Service was quickly restored, but the stability of the search feature, exclusive to Plus subscribers, remains to be observed.**
