Why Are ChatGPT, Claude, And Perplexity AI Suddenly Down?

Date: June 05, 2024

This morning, many AI tools went down and remained inoperational, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, among others.

The world has still not accepted the fact that their favorite social media apps run on heavy global servers that require continuous high-duty loads of electricity. That’s why whenever a social media app temporarily stops working, users across the globe find a way to brutally express their distress and anger on other social media apps. When Instagram goes down, individuals and meme page admins flood the timelines of Reddit, Twitter, and other working social apps without delay.

This behavior has now extended to AI chatbots, as witnessed today morning when Clause, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and others went down without any notice. The leading AI chatbots remained inaccessible for a good portion of time. Users have already flooded all social media platforms with their complaints, angst, and negative feedback for the platforms’ abrupt power outage. 

While this issue may be new to other platforms, OpenAI is no stranger to such power outages. This is the second time they have faced this, with the company attributing the outage to a collective power failure in their critical server infrastructure. Sam Altmann has been actively pursuing partnerships and investment opportunities to integrate sustainable and renewable energy sources instead of relying solely on the grid supply. While this may be a potential solution to the power outage for OpenAI, has the lack of energy supply reached other platforms as well? Or is this one due to some reason not known to us?

Open AI and Claude were the first to go out, followed by Perplexity. Perplexity has issued a statement regarding the power outage, claiming that the failure occurred due to a sudden surge in user activity across the globe. The reason behind this surge is attributed to the power outages of its peer AI chatbots this morning that shifted the reliance on Perplexity.

Gemini remained functional throughout the outage of other platforms, but some users have reported it briefly going down as well. If the reason claimed by Perplexity is true, it brings our attention to the ripple effect one AI chatbot has on others due to reasons like power outages. Are AI chatbots running on a thin line of maximum load capacity, leading to failure as soon as user activity surges?