World
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OpenAI’s ChatGPT faced a widespread outage on Sunday, March 31, 2025, after a surge in demand for its newly introduced Studio Ghibli-style image generation feature overwhelmed its servers.
The disruption, which began on Saturday evening, intensified on Sunday around 4 PM, with users across the world reporting difficulties in accessing the service. OpenAI later confirmed that all affected services had been fully restored after implementing a fix.
OpenAI Acknowledges Outage and Implements Fix
As complaints flooded social media, users encountered an error message stating:
“We are sorry, an error occurred. Please retry after a few minutes. It seems this application has become very popular, and its available rate limit has been reached.”
OpenAI promptly acknowledged the issue, stating, “We have identified that users are experiencing elevated errors for the impacted services. We are working on implementing a mitigation.”
According to Downdetector, a platform that tracks online service disruptions, 219 outage reports were recorded at 4:19 PM on Sunday, marking a sharp spike in user complaints.
By late Sunday, OpenAI confirmed that ChatGPT was back online, stating: “All impacted services have now fully recovered. The detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA) will be published in the next 5 business days.”
Studio Ghibli-Style Image Generation Sparks Server Overload
The primary reason for the outage was the overwhelming demand for ChatGPT’s new image generation feature, which enables users to create artwork in the style of Studio Ghibli, the renowned Japanese animation studio.
As users flocked to experiment with the feature, OpenAI’s servers became overloaded, leading to widespread accessibility issues. The demand was so intense that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took to X (formerly Twitter), urging users to slow down, posting:
“Can y’all please chill on generating images? This is insane, our team needs sleep.”
Global Impact of ChatGPT Outage
The ChatGPT outage disrupted services for users across the world, affecting various tasks, including:
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Content creation
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Coding assistance
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Image generation
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Research and business queries
Despite the temporary setback, the incident highlights the growing popularity and demand for AI-powered creative tools.
What’s Next?
With services now restored, OpenAI is expected to provide a detailed analysis of the incident in the coming days. Meanwhile, the massive response to the Studio Ghibli-style image generator underscores the continued evolution of AI-driven creativity and its potential to revolutionize digital art.
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