On Friday evening, OpenAI's popular chatbot ChatGPT faced a severe service interruption, impacting thousands of users. According to data from the outage tracking platform Downdetector.com, as of 7:13 PM Eastern Time, over 19,400 users reported being unable to access this widely-used AI service. In response, OpenAI swiftly issued a statement confirming they are aware of the issue and are actively investigating its cause.