Google News and OpenAI both go down on Friday morning
If you are having trouble trying to get the latest info from the Google News app today, or if you're attempting to access ChatGPT but can't, it's not you, According to DownDetector, Google has been experiencing issues this morning with both the Google News iOS and Android apps, and the website version. On Down Detector, the number of complaints submitted to the site from Google News users soared from 5 at 7:46 am EDT to 1,241 just 45 minutes later.
Visitors to the Google News website saw the image of an upside-down ice cream cone that said, "Uh-oh, something went wrong. Please try again." The outage was felt globally and while it appears that things are back to normal and have been since 9:50 am EDT, as recently as 11:30 am, a user in Florida was still insisting on DownDetector that the app was not working. Here in Massachusetts, the app is working perfectly.
Google News was down earlier today. Image credit-Future
OpenAI saw the number of complaints submitted to DownDetector rise sharply from 3 at 7:01 am EDT to 66 by 12:16 pm EDT. A DownDetector and ChatGPT user named Lisa McCoskey wrote, "No responses. Stuck on gray upload button, no matter what prompts are used." Another comment said, "It won't let me ask questions or make stories, and is stuck with the gray button." Others complained about the gray button and said that they couldn't use the app.
76% of those complaints coming into DownDetector about OpenAI said that the problem was affecting the ChatGPT AI chatbot with more complaints about the website (22%) than the app (2%). The outage map indicates that New York, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco are areas where OpenAI users have issues. My iPhone 15 Pro Max appears to be running the ChatGPT app flawlessly in Massachusetts.
Last night Verizon went down briefly as DownDetector received 12,416 complaints at 6:45 pm EDT compared to the 337 that were filed at 5:30 pm EDT. 60% complained that they couldn't use their mobile phone, 25% said that they had no signal, and 15% could not access the mobile internet. The carrier has no issues now but if you're a Verizon customer and did have a problem yesterday making or taking calls and using data, now you know why.
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