OpenAI's ChatGPT services experience outage

OpenAI's popular AI services, ChatGPT and Sora, experienced a brief outage on Thursday morning, although it was gradually resolved in the afternoon.

The incident sparked discussions on Chinese social media, but its impact on work and daily life was limited due to the availability of numerous alternatives, Shanghai Daily found.

"We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix," OpenAI stated on X.

The company previously reported a weekly active user base of 300 million globally. Its recent integration with Apple devices, including iPhones, in the United States is expected to further expand its user base.

"ChatGPT needs sleep and meditation too," Echo, a user working in the international tourism industry, posted in her WeChat account.

Currently, ChatGPT is not officially available on the Chinese mainland as there are many alternative tools in the domestic market.

TikTok owner ByteDance has developed Doubao, a ChatGPT-like conversational bot, which has about 51 million monthly active users in China, according to media reports. Other choices include Tencent-backed Kimi and Baidu's Ernie Bot.

On Wednesday, Google released Gemini 2.0 as its "latest, most capable AI model yet" with new capabilities like multimodal output with native image generation and audio output, and native use of tools including Google Search and Maps.